[OS X TeX] graphic conversion

Chris Goedde cgoedde at condor.depaul.edu
Tue Feb 15 10:18:16 EST 2005

On Feb 15, 2005, at 1:59 AM, Peder Axensten wrote:

> I'm under the impression that the difference between pdf and eps is 
> that pdf has NO "programming", whereas eps and ps have. The conversion 
> between ps and eps is extremely straightforward and can often be done 
> manually with a text editor. But to convert them to a pdf you need to 
> render the code and this is not straightforward, you need Distiller or 
> Ghostscript to do it. This is why pstricks doesn't in pdflatex without 
> extra steps to render the resulting ps code.

It's true that pdf contains a severely limited set of postscript's 
programming, but it's not (at least according to my reading of the pdf 
1.4 reference), nonexistent. pdf can contain what it calls "Type 4 
Postscript Functions" which can contain a subset of the postscript 
operators, including 'if' and 'ifelse', and various stack manipulation 
operators like 'copy' and 'roll'. (I think that these are enough to 
construct loop operations, if someone really wanted to.) So while 
postscript has a lot more power and flexibility than pdf as a 
programming language, pdf still has some.

Chris Goedde

           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>

More information about the MacOSX-TeX mailing list