The best solution is pdftops from Poppler, a somewhat successor of xpdf (see also this article). It preserves the fonts in PDF and produces a small and proper vector graph. To compile poppler on OSX 10.9, I need to edit “configure” and remove compiling option “-fno-check-new” as clang does not support this option.
Following the answer from this page, I have also tried a few other options. InkScape generates a small vector EPS, but it loses some features. Convert from ImageMagick outputs a bitmap EPS, which defeats the goal of vector graphs.
Interestingly, directly using the “gs” command from GhostScript seems to generate a vector EPS, but using the pdf2ps script produces an EPS with bitmap fonts. It turns out that the difference is caused by “-dNOCACHE”, which is surprising. Anyway, even though “gs” works, it generates a much larger EPS in comparison to pdftops. The winner is still pdftops from xpdf/poppler, at least in my case.
Leave a Reply