[tex-k] Bug in epstopdf (?)

[Pat Ridley]

Karl

Thanks very much for getting back to me on this. It is kind of you to 
take the time on this old problem.

At the time, I got this reply from Heiko Oberdiek:

"The file is in a DOS binary EPS format that is not supported by
epstopdf. The EPS section can be extracted by the Perl script
dosepsbin, seehttps://www.ctan.org/pkg/dosepsbin.

    (1) dosepsbin --inputfile Silly_1.eps --eps-file s.eps
    (2a) epstopdf s.eps -o s.pdf
    (2b) ps2pdf -dEPSCrop s.eps s.pdf

"

The context was my use of the GoWrite2 program to produce Go diagrams. 
When I passed on the above to Lauri Paatero, author of GoWrite, he 
pointed out that I was selecting eps output that generated a binary 
preview in the file. When I stopped doing this, the problem went away.

Better still, Lauri decided to add an option to GoWrite2 that produces a 
pdf directly, so the intermediate eps file is now redundant. I've been 
happily using that for the last 18 months or so.

Best wishes
Pat

On 08/07/2023 17:44, Karl Berry wrote:
> Pat and all - back on your report about epstopdf from 2020 (sorry).
>
>      https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-k/2020-September/003331.html
>      [...]
>      Silly_1.eps converts to a blank file Silly_1-eps-converted-to.pdf
>
> It works for me. (So does Silly_NM.) Heiko added support for the DOS EPS
> binary format in 2013 (epstopdf 2.20).
>
> I think either you may have a truly old version of epstopdf (probably
> not, since your miktex looked reasonably up to date), or perhaps it was
> a bug in the Ghostscript of the time handling the fonts that the
> numbered labels came from. Or something.
>
> If you run epstopdf --debug Silly_1.eps, it will report what it's doing.
> What I get is:
>
> [...]
> * DOS EPS binary file header found
> *   PS offset: 30
> *   PS length: 6887
> *   No checksum
> * Scanning header for BoundingBox
> * Old BoundingBox: 0 0 135 111
> * New BoundingBox: 0 0 135 111
> * Offset: 0 0
> GPL Ghostscript 10.01.2 (2023-06-21)
> [...]
> * Done.
>
> And the result pdf can be parsed, and also looks valid visually (the
> expected Go game board):
>
> $ pdfinfo Silly_1.pdf | grep "Page size"
> Page size:      135 x 111 pts (rotated 0 degrees)
>
> I'll attach the input file since you might not have it at hand after
> nearly three years :).
>
> Hope this helps, and thanks for the report. --karl.
>
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