Re[3]: EPS export

[Alan G Isaac <aisaac american edu>]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2002  Alan G Isaac <aisaac@american.edu> wrote:
> http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/technotes/postscript.html
> See Technical Notes 5001 (p.43) and especially 5002.


> On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 17:39:42 +0200 Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille@chepelov.org> wrote:
>> To summarise, you would like the DSC header in EPS to mention "%%Pages 0"
>> rather than "%%Pages 1", and the DSC header in PS to provide both "%%Pages
>> <total>" and one "%%Page <num>" per page. Is this correct?


On Tue, 24 Sep 2002  Alan G Isaac <aisaac@american.edu> wrote:
> Correct for PS.
> If the %%Pages: comment must be included in the EPS file,
> then correct there too.  But I would prefer to just leave
> it out of the EPS file.


After chatting with a couple people on comp.lang.postscript,
I am going to modify my position.

I now think the matter turns on whether or not a 'showpage'
command should be at the end of the EPS file.

The spec clearly suggests including the %%Pages: comment,
even though this is evidently redundant for an EPS file.

If there is no 'showpage' in the file, this redundancy seems
extreme to the point of ridiculousness.  I simply cannot
imagine an actual interpreter that would use this
information.  I suggest Dia should produce EPS files with no
%%Pages: comment, no %%Page: comment, and no 'showpage'
operator.  This violates no requirements of the current
EPSF spec.

However if the EPS file is going to include a 'showpage'
operator, it seems correct (although highly redundant)
to include the
%%Pages: 1
and
%%Page: 1 1
comments in the EPS file.  But the EPSF spec does *not* list
these as required, and again I cannot imagine how an
interpreter would use them, so perhaps it still makes sense
to omit them.  (I am told Illustrator omits them, fwiw.)

Cheers,
Alan