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Use UNIX line breaks for epstopdf UNIX

epstopdf is a command line tool (available via fink) that does what it says: convert EPS to PDF files. If you give it an EPS file created from QuarkXPress or Adobe Illustrator, you might receive the error message "Warning: BoundingBox not found!". But if you look into the source code of your EPS file, there is a line containing proper "BoundingBox" information.

What's causing the problem? Older versions of epstopdf can only handle files with UNIX-, not Mac-style line breaks/line endings inside. To convert your EPS file to UNIX line endings, take a look at this hint and that hint. I currently use the free (but discontinued?) "BBEdit Lite" text editor for conversion.

As well, remove spaces from the name of the EPS file.

The epstopdf command from Gerben Wierda's TeX distribution is supposed to support Mac line breaks out of the box. If epstopdf --version yields something with gw, you have this variant.

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Use UNIX line breaks for epstopdf
Authored by: mbroughtn on Dec 11, '03 11:52:22AM

BBEdit Lite is still alive and available at ftp://ftp.barebones.com/pub/freeware



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BBEditLite status
Authored by: gatorparrots on Dec 11, '03 01:54:32PM
I wouldn't exactly call BBEditLite "alive and well":

http://www.barebones.com/products/bblite/index.shtml
"Thank you for your interest in BBEdit Lite. BBEdit Lite has been discontinued and is no longer being developed or supported. Anyone currently using the software is welcome to continue doing so, in accordance with the existing license agreement.

It's still available on the 'net (and remains my preferred text editor), but it isn't active or alive, according to Bare Bones Software.

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BBEditLite status
Authored by: Anonymous on Dec 11, '03 04:10:06PM
It is downloadable, yes. However, it is static and frozen as is; no further development will occur on it. Bare Bones replaced it with TextWrangler, which has some improvements over BBEdit Lite but does cost $50.

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Use UNIX line breaks for epstopdf
Authored by: webentourage on Dec 11, '03 04:37:06PM

Panther has support for a command called pstopdf built right in. It's the same code used by the system to generate pdf's in the print dialog. It works great for eps's as well, no matter what type of line endings are used.



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Use UNIX line breaks for epstopdf
Authored by: ambrose on Dec 12, '03 09:37:40AM

In Panther's GUI, you can open an .eps file having either UNIX or Mac line endings using the Preview app. It converts Postscript to .pdf, and it further has the ability to then export that file (or a selected portion of it) to any of a number of text and graphics formats.

It's this ability to select a part of the text or a section of a graphic that makes it particularly useful to me.



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