.EPS

Introduction

EPS is a PostScript program that draws a single picture and is written to be placed inside other documents. It was defined by Adobe, and version 3.0 of the specification dates from 1992. For decades it was the standard way to hand logos and illustrations to printers and page layout programs.

An EPS file must declare its bounding box, the area it draws in, and must not change the state of the page it is placed on. Because a layout program may not be able to run PostScript, an EPS can carry a small preview image to show on screen instead. PDF and SVG have largely taken its place, but EPS is still common in print and stock artwork.

Structure

A plain EPS file is text. Its first line is %!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0, and comment lines that follow the Document Structuring Conventions describe it: %%BoundingBox is required and gives the drawing area in points, and others give the title, creator and fonts. The PostScript drawing code follows.

A file with a Windows or TIFF preview starts instead with a 30-byte binary header. Its first 4 bytes are C5 D0 D3 C6, followed by the offset and length of the PostScript section, of a Windows Metafile preview and of a TIFF preview, and a checksum. On the Mac the preview was kept in the file’s resource fork. EPSI files carry a preview as hexadecimal comment lines instead.

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