[Scribus] Importing EPSF files in Scribus by pstoedit!

[Greg Novak]

Suki Venkat, [TnQ] writes:
 > I wanted to import some LaTeX equations into Scribus.
 > I did "dvips -E file.dvi" to get the EPSF file.
 > The EPSF file doesn't look nice either in Scribus or PDF.
 > I suppose like a LaTeX stuff it may print okay!
 > I would like to try to use "pstoedit", to make it into SVG and import
 > into Scribus. Unfortunately, while trying to install "pstoedit", I get
 > one of those infinite loop of dependency problems. I tried "yum
 > install", "up2date" on my Fedora Core 3 without success.
 > The site www.pstoedit.net doesn't give source files, so I don't know
 > what to do. I have gsview, Inkscape installed, but without "pstoedit".
 > Please help!

I've been fighting with similar things and here's what I've learned.  
1) As already noted, for decent output make sure that the graphic
isn't being rasterized at some step.
2) The version of Ghostview that you have is important.
3) To get SVG out of pstoedit, you'll also need to install the
Gnu plotutils library.
4) If you use the computer modern fonts (which, with Latex, you
probably do) you'll likely need do use the -dt command line option in
pstoedit, which makes the text into curves.  

At first, I couldn't get my EPS files to be effectively processed by
Inkscape, Scribus, _or_ pstoedit.  Basically, I installed a recent
version of Ghostscript and it solved all of my problems.  

For my own sanity, I made RPM spec files of the software I needed to
get this going.  I've put both the binary and source RPMS here:
http://www.ucolick.org/~novak/scribus

The RPMS are non-standard in that I designed them to install into
/usr/local so that I could maintain both the fedora default
Ghostscript 7.07 and the most recent version of ghostscript, 8.51.
Thus, the ghostscript RPMS have funny names, gsn-ghostscript (GSN are
my initials).  You'll also likely need to make sure that
/usr/local/bin is before /usr/bin in your path so that the new gs is
found. 

If you want to do something different, the .spec files should be easy
to edit.  Then you should be able to build the RPMS with something
like 'rpmbuild -ba file.spec'  ** I caution you ** to do the builds as
a regular user, *not* as root.  I blew away /usr/local on my machine
by misunderstanding one of the spec file variables.  The spec files
and RPMS work for me, but as always use at your own risk.

Cheers,
Greg