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Participant
September 11, 2008
Question

Stripping EPS before injection into postscript file

  • September 11, 2008
  • 1 reply
  • 503 views
I'm currently parsing the windows binary format in 5.2 of the EPS 3.0 spec and scanning for %%BeginPreview ... %EndPreview to remove the previews and that's working fine.

I couldn't help noticing that the EPS file I got from Illustrator has a block of private data after the '%AI9_PrintingDataEnd' that's twice the size of the preceeding postscript. When I strip out everything after '%AI9_PrintingDataEnd' before injecting into my postscript, it seems to work just fine. Does anyone know whether this will work in the general case?
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1 reply

Participating Frequently
September 11, 2008
I would be very cautious about such things. Certainly, you cannot in
general strip any comment from an EPS, because the PostScript may
choose to read the comment as data.

Illustrator has save options that can affect the EPS size, I think.
The main reason for the size is that it contains all of the design
extras, not just what is needed to print, to allow Illustrator to
re-open the file. Clearly not needed for printing, but you'd want to
be very sure you were removing stuff that wasn't needed.

Aandi Inston