Convert EPS to PDF
This conversion loses nothing. PostScript and PDF are the same idea a generation apart — both describe a drawing as geometry — so the artwork is translated rather than photographed. The result is sharp at any size, and the page is cropped to the drawing rather than dropped in the middle of a sheet of letter paper.
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Add to Chrome — freeDrop your EPS file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Vectors preserved — nothing is rasterized
- Page cropped to the artwork's bounding box
- Verified sharp at 600 dpi from a 200pt source
- Nothing to install
How to use EPS to PDF
- 1
Add the EPS
Drop it in. Ghostscript reads the PostScript directly, which is what makes this a translation rather than a rendering.
- 2
The drawing is rewritten
PostScript operators become PDF operators. No resolution is chosen, because a vector-to-vector conversion does not need one.
- 3
Download the PDF
One page, the size of the artwork, sharp at every zoom level.
How it works
Ghostscript reads the PostScript and writes the equivalent PDF drawing
operators, with -dEPSCrop so the page equals the declared bounding box, and
with its sandbox enabled because the input is a program from the internet.
Nothing is rasterized and no resolution is involved.
The same idea, twenty years apart
PostScript and PDF are more closely related than any other pair of formats this site converts between.
Adobe built PostScript in 1984 as a language for describing a printed page: curves, fills, text, coordinates. PDF, in 1993, is what you get when you take that language, remove the ability to loop and compute, and add a structure that lets a reader jump to page 40 without executing pages 1 to 39 first.
So converting EPS to PDF is not translating between two ideas of what a picture is. It is transcribing the same description into a newer, more constrained grammar. A curve stays a curve, defined by its control points, and is drawn fresh at whatever size the viewer asks for.
The crop that most converters skip
An EPS declares a BoundingBox — the rectangle the drawing occupies. It does not declare a page, because an EPS is meant to be placed inside someone else's page.
Ghostscript therefore needs to be told to use that box. Left to its default it puts your artwork on a letter-sized page with a great deal of white around it, which is what produces "my logo is a tiny thing in the corner of an A4". The crop is passed here, so a 200 by 150 point drawing becomes a 200 by 150 point page.
What to do with it next
The artwork is now a document. Join several together with /merge-pdf, put a password on it with /protect-pdf if it is going outside the company, or send it to a print shop — which is what they wanted in the first place, and now they can open it.
The LaTeX migration this replaces
If you write with LaTeX, this conversion is one you have probably needed.
The original latex toolchain produced DVI and accepted EPS figures. Its
replacement, pdflatex, produces PDF directly and does not accept EPS at all —
so a document written over several years typically contains a mix, and the EPS
figures stop the build.
The traditional fix is epstopdf, a script that runs Ghostscript with exactly
the arguments used here, including the bounding-box crop. This is the same
operation without the install: convert each figure once, change the extension in
your \includegraphics calls, and the build goes through. The output is
byte-for-byte the sort of file epstopdf produces, because it is the same
program doing the work.
Examples
A logo going to a printer
Print shops ask for PDF and want vectors. This is both, at any size the press runs at.
A figure for a modern document
LaTeX moved from EPS to PDF years ago. This is the conversion that move requires, and it costs nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Are the vectors genuinely preserved?
Yes, and you can check it yourself. The output PDF contains zero embedded images — list them with any PDF tool and there is nothing to list, because there are no pixels in the file. A converter that rasterized would show one large image per page. Second check: the result renders 1667 by 1250 pixels at 600 dpi from artwork nominally 200 by 150 points, which only a resolution-independent file can do.
What size will the page be?
The EPS bounding box. This is worth stating because the default behavior is different: without being told to crop, Ghostscript places a small drawing in the middle of a letter-sized page, which is a correct conversion of a file nobody wanted. The page here equals the artwork.
Why convert EPS to PDF at all?
Because PDF is where the world went. EPS was the interchange format from the late 1980s onward; PDF replaced it, is opened by every browser, phone and reader, and is what printers and publishers now ask for. Converting costs nothing in quality, so there is no reason to keep sending a format that half your recipients cannot open.
Will the text be selectable?
If the EPS still contained live text with embedded fonts, usually yes. A great many EPS files converted their type to outlines before saving — a standard precaution against missing fonts at the printer — and outlines are shapes, so they stay shapes. Nothing here turns one into the other.
Does my file leave my computer?
Yes. PostScript is a programming language, and interpreting it safely needs Ghostscript with its sandbox on, which is a server job rather than a browser one. Your file and the result are both deleted within 30 minutes by a timer, and nothing is stored, indexed or examined.
Further reading
- Converting a PDF to Grayscale Made It BiggerRemoving color sounds like removing data, so grayscale gets used as a compression step. On a document that was already black text on white, the conversion made the file larger — and the reason it did is the reason it sometimes makes a scan dramatically smaller.
- Three PDFs Merged Into Less Than Half Their Combined SizePeople expect a merged PDF to weigh what its inputs weighed, and are surprised when it does not. Joining three copies of an eight-page document produced a file well under half the combined size, and the reason explains something useful about what is actually inside a PDF.
- Rotating Every Page of a PDF Cost 29 BytesA rotated PDF looks like a document that has been redrawn, so people expect rotating one to cost something — quality, size, or both. It costs almost nothing, and understanding why tells you which other PDF operations are safe and which are not.