Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Automate image conversion?

E

enfolder

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 24, 2008
7
0
I need to convert a large number of .eps files to .pdf. Unfortunately, because of a strange landscaping issue with the particular application that generated the eps files (IDL), ps2pdf does not do the right thing: it stuffs the landscaped image at the bottom of a portrait page, chopping off the right hand margin. An extensive search reveals that there is apparently no option to force it to properly convert landscape eps files into PDFs, just a few hacks that are insufficient for my purposes.

Graphics Converter always wants to read in the eps file as a pixelated image, so the resulting PDFs look terrible.

The good news is that Preview is smart enough to properly orient the files and save them as perfect PDFs -- vector fonts, no pixelation, reasonable file size, everything perfect just the way I want them.

So, my question is: is there a way to automate the process of opening each file in Preview and saving it with the same file name (except for the extension)?

Automator doesn't seem to have a "convert image" feature that accepts eps files. There are a few posts floating around about people that tried the obvious thing and failed to get it to work -- does anyone have a proven example of how to do this? Perhaps there is a sufficiently generic AppleScript out there that I can use without learning a new scripting language?
 
Preview converts EPSF files to PDF when it opens them. All you have to do is to then save the file.
 
enfolder said:
Yes, that's what I wrote. But this thread is about how to automate that process.
Click to expand...
You asked about automating the conversion process. The conversion process is automatic when you attempt to open the file. All you need to automate are the open attempt and the save.
 
MisterMe said:
You asked about automating the conversion process. The conversion process is automatic when you attempt to open the file. All you need to automate are the open attempt and the save.
Click to expand...

I agree. That's why I started the thread. Do you have a proven solution for this task?

If you follow the link given by Dalton you will see that this is nontrivial, and apparently impossible without 3rd party software. I was hoping to find a solution here.
 
Dalton63841 said:
Check this out: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1774245

You may want to read all of it. Several good ideas for doing exactly what you want.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Dalton. I have seen that thread, which strongly suggests it's basically impossible to do this without 3rd party software. I was hoping to find out that they missed something obvious, because Automator seems to be designed specifically for this sort of thing and so it's surprising to learn that it can't handle such a simple task.

I'll guess I'll have to give dragoman a try.
 
as there are so many problems in your image conveting software, why don't you choose some stable and professional one?
 
BeaufortTIFF said:
as there are so many problems in your image conveting software, why don't you choose some stable and professional one?
Click to expand...
Randomly aggressive post to an old thread.

If the OP is interested, you can always use AppleScript within Automator to overcome its shortcomings. While there is an action to open images in Preview, which would create a PDF from an EPS, there doesn't seem to be one that saves the new file.

Alternatively, the shell command "pstopdf" will be able to batch process EPS files easily.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back