LibreOffice 4.0 released

Posted Feb 19, 2013 18:55 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Thanks for the clarification - in MS Word it appears to be possible to embed it directly.

Not really. It's possible to import it - but this process has different levels of success depending on what kind of program you have use to produce said EPS file. Wikipedia contains all the gory details.

The only thing you can reliably do with EPS is to embed it in your document as kind-of "blackbox": you know dimensions and you know how to print it but that's all.

My experience of vector graphics in the day-to-day office world (ie. amongst non-FOSS people for whom that's not their job, but might come up as part of it) is that there are two vector formats that exist: EPS and AI. Since MS Word appears to work with EPS pretty well, it would be very useful if LO did too.

Correction: EPS produced by some applications works fine with some versions of MS Office for some operations - if you are lucky. In the end it's trial-and-error implementations which handle some usecases essentially without documentation and guidelines (or, rather, there are tons of documentation and huge amount of guidelines - basically one for each program which can produce EPS file). Sure, it may be good idea to produce something which will successfully parse at least most common EPS files out there, but that's huge undertaking and it does not look like LibreOffice team has the resources for such undertaking. Especially if you want to correctly handle more esoteric cases with alpha-channels and other "interesting" bits (which are implemented using different extensions in different programs).

Posted Feb 24, 2013 18:17 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]