Question

My goal is to import EPS file to the app(language is C++) to create a 3D object. I am looking for some library/tool which will help me to parse EPS to a list of primitives(circles, lines, paths, etc. like in SVG) or even contours array. I’ve already tried the way to convert EPS to SVG first using pstoedit and uniconverter tools. But sometimes both tools make wrong conversation with data loosing. So I can not say that this way is acceptable.
Does anyone have experience in this area or have any suggestions?

Answer 1

This is a big project. For starters you will need a PostScript interpreter, there is no alternative to this, since the EPS can contain very nearly anything.

Rather than writing your own interpreter I would suggest you use an existing one, in fact I would suggest you use Ghostscript as it is the only GPL PS interpreter I know of.

You can write a Ghostscript containing methods which will be executed whenever the relevant operation is interpreted from the input. There is an existing (very limited, incomplete) SVG output device which would get you started.

You are going to have to handle a lot of different kinds of operations if you want a general purpose solution; For instance PostScript doesn’t have a circle primitive, its curves are all Beziers, there are different kinds of line joins. You will need to consider what to do with images and presumably text (possibly discard these) and shading patterns. You will have to at least understand the various colour spaces which can be used, even if you don’t plan on utilising them yourself.

Given that PostScript is inherently 2D I don’t really see how you are going to construct a 3D object, but that’s a different problem.