seeing your postscript file, still
Jeff Bone
> ...I was under the impression that the EPS files that, after being
> imported into Pagemaker, are displayed as simply a gray box
> (sometimes with a message or two included in the top left hand
> corner) are in fact not EPS files, but rather PS files. That is, they
> are not encapsulated.
Encapsulated PostScript files (EPS), in their simplest form, are nothing more
than a PostScript file (PS) with no showpage and end of file PostScript
commands. They usually should not include output headers for defining
printer specifications and commands. They (EPS files) usually should include
preview headers for the machine they will be used on (low res TIFF file for
PC, PICT file for Macintosh) but they DO NOT have to. By its very nature an
EPS file is designed to be "encapsulated" or embedded in another series of
PostScript commands destined for an output device.
He also writes...
> I was also under the impression that an encapsulated postscript file
> includes a bitmapped image of the graphic that a regular postscript
> file lacks. That is the reason why Pagemaker displays only a box. It
> has the postscript definition for the file, but has no idea how to
> interpretate that postscript to something that can be displayed on
> the screen without having that encapsulated bitmapped image. Thus, if
> you print it to a postscript printer, it will appear fine.
EPS files generally do have headers (bitmapped images), but that is not a
requirement, merely a convenience.
> Was there any consensus on a whether or not there exists a way to
> convert a straight PS file to be .EPS. (That is, convert the graphic
> so that the actual image will be used by PM instead of the gray box)
Again the PS file you are speaking of is probably an EPS file without a
preview header, and, of course, there is no current way to add a header to the
file itself, but I think a couple of users have suggested some very good
workaround solutions such as moving the file into Arts & Letters and creating
a TIFF file for position only then substituting the EPS file at print time.
Another solution if you are a Mac user with a scanner but no illustration
software is to print out the no-header EPS file and scan the print at 72 dpi.
This will give you a very close (most often close enough) representation of
the EPS file that you can place in your document for preview, scaling, and
positioning. Through away the scan at print time and replace with the EPS
file at the same dimensions. This can work for PC users as well, but it is
less accurate because the PC screen is not defined at a fixed dpi. (Big
screen Mac users beware, most big screens over 19 inches use higher dpi too).
Jeff Bone <jb...@dopig.uab.edu>
University of Alabama at Birmingham