As the Save As pdf requires an Acrobat filter I have tried saving in eps
format. The document size in bytes appears to be retained in eps and so
I assume there has been no loss of data.
However, what problems am I likely to encounter when passing eps files
to a printer for final printing?
I can't speak for smaller printers, but the printers we deal with at the
POST strongly prefer PDF for everything. That said, most printers should
be able to convert an EPS (which is just a variant of PostScript) to PDF
anyway. The best way to find out is to ask your printers.
That said, you could also use GhostScript's ps2pdf tool, which is a free
PDF converter capable of press-quality output. I use it for documents
that Acrobat Distiller chokes on at work - the file size is larger than
what Distiller produces for the same file, but it's otherwise exactly right.
GhostScript may be built in to MacOS X as part of CUPS, or might be
available via fink. I don't know, I don't really use OSX.
It's not a GUI app, but it's pretty easy to use. Simply:
ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress input.ps output.pdf
(run as a command from the terminal).
Craig Ringer
