GNU Astronomy Utilities

10.3.12.4 EPS files (eps.h)

The Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) format is commonly used to store images (or individual/single-page parts of a document) in the PostScript documents. For a more complete introduction, please see Recognized file formats. To provide high quality graphics, the Postscript language is a vectorized format, therefore pixels (elements of a “rasterized” format) aren’t defined in their context.

To display rasterized images, PostScript does allow arrays of pixels. However, since the over-all EPS file may contain many vectorized elements (for example borders, text, or other lines over the text) and interpreting them is not trivial or necessary within Gnuastro’s scope, Gnuastro only provides some functions to write a dataset (in the gal_data_t format, see Generic data container (gal_data_t)) into EPS.

Function:
int
gal_eps_name_is_eps (char *name)

Return 1 if name has an EPS suffix. This can be used to make sure that a given input file is EPS. See gal_eps_suffix_is_eps for a list of recognized suffixes.

Function:
int
gal_eps_suffix_is_eps (char *name)

Return 1 if suffix is a recognized EPS suffix. The recognized suffixes are .eps, .EPS, .epsf, .epsi.

Function:
void
gal_eps_to_pt (float widthincm, size_t *dsize, size_t *w_h_in_pt)

Given a specific width in centimeters (widthincm and the number of the dataset’s pixels in each dimension (dsize) calculate the size of the output in PostScript points. The output values are written in the w_h_in_pt array (which has to be allocated before calling this function). The first element in w_h_in_pt is the width and the second is the height of the image.

Function:
void
gal_eps_write (gal_data_t *in, char *filename, float widthincm, uint32_t borderwidth, int hex, int dontoptimize, int forpdf)

Write the in dataset into an EPS file called filename. in has to be an unsigned 8-bit character type (GAL_TYPE_UINT8, see Numeric data types). The desired width of the image in human/non-pixel units (to help the displayer) can be set with the widthincm argument. If borderwidth is non-zero, it is interpreted as the width (in points) of a solid black border around the image. A border can helpful when importing the EPS file into a document.

EPS files are plain-text (can be opened/edited in a text editor), therefore there are different encodings to store the data (pixel values) within them. Gnuastro supports the Hexadecimal and ASCII85 encoding. ASCII85 is more efficient (producing small file sizes), so it is the default encoding. To use Hexadecimal encoding, set hex to a non-zero value. Currently If you don’t directly want to import the EPS file into a PostScript document but want to later compile it into a PDF file, set the forpdf argument to 1.

By default, when the dataset only has two values, this function will use the PostScript optimization that allows setting the pixel values per bit, not byte (Recognized file formats). This can greatly help reduce the file size. However, when dontoptimize!=0, this optimization is disabled: even though there are only two values (is binary), the difference between them does not correspond to the full contrast of black and white.

Read in other formats.

GNU Astronomy Utilities 0.13 manual, September 2020.