Again during these last weeks I had to deal with clients having or wanting EPS files. I generally don’t deliver EPS files because I don’t really like them…But sometimes the client insists on having an EPS or only has an EPS and as you always know the client is always right! Today, and while I was just thinking about a similar issue, I stumbled upon a thread on the SitePoint forums where the Original Poster was struggling with “compatibility” problems that prevented him from opening an EPS saved on a Mac OS in a Windows environment! This pushed me to blog about this especially that I was quite inactive here during the last six months or so. EPS stands for Encapsulated Post Script and it is, then, totally independent of any OS/Platform. The only difference that will cause those “incompatibility” problems is probably the choice of the data format of the preview raster graphic.

I usually work on both Mac OS and Windows but sometimes when I’m on the move I frequently take my windows laptop with me and if a client hands me a Flash USB key containing an .EPS file saved on a Mac OS and that has a preview embedded in it, I’ll be unable to open/see it right then unless we have a Mac nearby! And this really wastes a lot of time … and time is money. This is due to the fact that EPS saved on a MAC OS contains data format for the preview which is not compatible with Windows…
The EPS format was originally developed by Adobe. It was intended to be used as a vector format, and not raster. It is, again, platform independent and can’t be displayed on a screen if you don’t have “Display PostScript”. EPS can be opened with Vector programs (i.e. Adobe Illustrator, FreeHand, InkScape…) and most of the times it can be also opened with Photoshop but the latter will rasterize your vectors.

On the contrary to the common belief, EPS files are not meant to be rendered by a PostScript printer on paper. They were developed to be encapsulated/embedded in another file. So EPS files aren’t PS files!

So and because of all the waste of time and headaches that I witnessed while dealing with EPS I’m not a big fan of EPS!

I’ve had cases where an embedded EPS file shows up when I open it in the Illustrator but it won’t print and that was due to the fact that the EPS file had a high-resolution TIF embedded in it!
So I just want to ask, if you’re not going to encapsulate the graphic you’re saving as an EPS in another file why not save it as a native AI files? Or a PDF? Or if you don’t need it to be in a vector format why not just save as a PSD?

Anyway if you’re just in love with EPS format just save your graphics if you’re on a Mac with a cross-platform 8bit TIFF preview… So that the EPS can be graphically interpreted by Illustrator or Photoshop on your windows machine!

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. RSS 2.0

Have you read?:

Photoshop Smart Objects: are they that smart?

Oh! I look like some celebrities!

Adobe kuler!!

Extreme digital painting!