Manually Convert EPS to SVG
Update: Several readers have suggested easier and more effective methods. Check the comments section!
EPS is the vector graphic file format Adobe Illustrator saves in. Supposedly you can import these files directly to Inkscape if you have skencil and pstoedit installed, but I couldn’t make it work. So I converted it manually using the GIMP and Inkscape. Here’s how I did it.
First, open the file with the GIMP. When you do, the import dialog box will appear. The important setting here is the resolution. The higher the resolution, the more accurate the image will appear. I used 600, but you could go higher for more detail. GIMP 2.4 automatically adjusts the width and height, but if your version does not, make sure you multiply the width and height by the same factor as the resolution. Also, select “Strong” under both the antialiasing headings.
Once you’ve got it open in the GIMP, you’re going to save as a PNG file. Here are the settings I use:
Now you can close the GIMP if you want to free up some RAM, and open the new PNG file in Inkscape. In Inkscape, click Path > Trace to bitmap.
Inkscape will trace the bitmap and paste the new vector directly on top of the bitmap, so you may not notice any difference. Simply click the image and drag it to the side, and you’ll see there are two copies. The one with a transparent background is the vector. You should delete the bitmap by selecting it and pressing [Del].
Finally, you’ll want to center your new vector back on the page. Making sure it’s selected, click the Align and Distribute button. Change the “Relative to” drop down box to “Page”. Now, click the center vertically and center horizontally buttons once each.
Finally, save the file in SVG format, and you’re done.
Gimparoo! 
Or you can use pstoedit
pstoedit -f plot-svg inputfile.eps outputfile.svg
:)
Very nice. I’ll give that a try. Thanks!
An other option is use Scribus, import and save as svg.
I couldn’t get pstoedit to work. It starts and acts like it’s doing something, but then it just sits there.
I don’t have Scribus installed at the moment, but I’ll give it a try later.
Thanks!
Pstoedit requires a license key to save to svg.
[…] and some paths were filled, rather than originally being hollow.. I then found this blog entry on Gimparoo! on how to convert eps files manually. He suggests opening the eps file using gimp with a high […]
[…] laziness, these always seem to come in EPS. For a long time now, I have used the method outlined at Gimparoo, but this has limited me to logos that are one-colour. This presents a problem for more complicated […]
Worth a try. Also the scribus way.
How about the .ai files?
Check eps2svg.info for online conversion service
eps2svg.info is not available anymore – 404 Not Found!
[…] Gimparoo offers the following advice (for single color vectors): […]
This worked great for me. The latest version of Inkscape is a solid open source alternative to Adobe for my basic usage.
Thank you so much for the useful info. You rescued me from the nightmare where I had to convert 72dpi pics to 300dpi for journal paper format.. Many thanks!!!
Another method is converting the eps to pdf, then opening the pdf in Inkscape. To convert an eps file to pdf I use EpsToPdf on the command line (terminal): “epstopdf myfile.eps”. There are also online conversion tools.
One issue I had with pstoedit was paths with spaces. This problem happened with Scribus, too, because Scribus uses pstoedit to process eps files.
Example problem:
>pstoedit cti_logo.eps cti_logo.svg
pstoedit: version 3.45 / DLL interface 108 (build Feb 28 2008 – release build – g++ 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu1)) : Copyright (C) 1993 – 2007 Wolfgang Glunz
No explicit output format specified – using plot-svg as derived from suffix of output file
Error: /undefinedfilename in (/home/jeff/Sol)
Operand stack:
…blah blah blah…
The interpreter seems to have failed, cannot proceed !
The problem is right after “Sol” in my example. That is a directory with a space in its name! So pstoedit appears to convert local paths to absolute ones, and does it without quoting the path name. So, yes, IMO, a bug.
The solution was to copy the EPS file in question to /tmp (or other path with no space in the name) with a filename that had no spaces. After that the pstoedit one-liner worked fine!
Thank you and good night.
Not that I’m impressed a lot, but this is more than I expected for when I found a link on Delicious telling that the info here is awesome. Thanks.
epstopdf worked like a charm for me. It produced an error in the terminal but still worked beautifully. Thanks,
If anyone cares to try on Ubunutu:
sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils
not useful, too slow
What you can also do:
1. Open .eps in Inkscape.
2. Save as .svg.
This appears to preserve the vector information on the files I’ve tried.
Yes, this is probably the best way, since they have improved support for EPS, among other things in Inkscape 0.47 (svn build)
thanks for the informtioin. i did not know how to dothis on GImp. Thanks for the tutorials.
If yao cannot open an eps in inkscape, there is certainly no use to try it with pstoedit as inkscape itself uses that handy oneliner to get a file…
if you cannot open an epsfile in inkscape the main reason is that the eps is crap.
The workaround with pdf does it’s job, but it certainly produces a whole new dimension of data.
the gimp-workaround is suitable for all kinds of layered pictures (no gradients envolved)….
anyways, thanks for all the useful information :)
I just opened and used Cisco EPS icons with inkscape without pstoedit installed. I’m using inkscape .46-devel if that means anything. It claims (and treats it?) like a PDF, but I was surprised how well it worked. Just FYI.
but tracking not always make good result ..because some corners in complexed shapes will not appear correctly …
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Thank you so much for this! You’re a doll! You know, I’m wondering if Inkscape can do the same for BRUSHES. I couldn’t even open an EPS in GIMP 2.6 or JASC Animation shop, which also accepts ESP files.
Any suggestions? Thanks so much in advance!
Ghostscript will let you automate conversion of most eps files (though it fails on some):
for file in *.eps
do
gs -dNOPAUSE -dEPSFitPage -sDEVICE=svg -sOutputFile=”${file%.*}.svg” “$file” quit.ps;
done
Ghostscript does have the annoying habit of setting the image on a page though so you will need to fix that in Inkscape. I don’t know how to auto-crop an svg file. (Perhaps there is some way to get Inkscape to do it.)
You can get rid of the page when you convert it to a bitmap format though, with ImageMagick’s “mogrify” command and its “-trim” operator:
gs -dEPSFitPage -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=png16m -r300 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile=”${file%.*}.png” “$file” quit.ps;
mogrify -trim “${file%.*}.png”
If you’re puzzled about the “${file%.*}.png” it is just a simple way for the bash shell to remove the “.eps” extension from the filename. If you are not using Linux and don’t mind a filename like “blah.eps.png” then just replace it with “$file.png”