Last modified: 11:03:53, Wed 14 Nov 2001 UTC
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There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.--Bill Gates
epsmerge is a perl program for merging EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) files into one bigger EPS file. It does this by reading the files and arranging them in rows (or columns), squeezing them together so that they all fit. It can squeeze in several ways: uniformly, preserving aspect ratios, preserving the relative sizes of the images, etc. It can also be used to format a single EPS file on a paper which can then be sent to a printer. There are options to put labels over or under the images.
Some nice person at Quite has written a page explaining how EPS differs from ordinary postscript. (Note, however, that epsmerge allows cheating: you can tell epsmerge that you want to print the EPS file on a paper of any size.)
epsmerge is distributed under the GNU General Public License in the hope that it may be useful (but without warranty of any kind).
This version of epsmerge was built to run on Unix systems -- I am not able to test it myself on non-Unix systems. However, recently some brave people have reported success with epsmerge on Microsoft Windows NT using perls 5.005 and 5.6.0.
See the what's new & todo page for information.
The latest version of epsmerge is 2.2.2 ``Bethnal Green''. If it doesn't work for you, you can also try some of the old versions. (What happened to 2.2.1, I hear you ask? Well, it became 2.2.2. Silly!)
You can read the latest version of the documentation separately or download it and try it out:
| File | Size | MD5 sum |
| epsmerge-1.2.3.tar.gz | 43.62K | ade92cf15c25e9d4a7c09d3ef582e7a7 |
| epsmerge-1.2.3.tar.bz2 | 41.13K | a8cb47fe5bf4c7bb661340292019115b |
| epsmerge-2.0.0.tar.gz | 55.31K | 64e98974abfc3fb9b95c2cb15a6f62b2 |
| epsmerge-2.0.0.tar.bz2 | 46.47K | 981095004a85afa0d755408206fd6c26 |
| epsmerge-2.1.0.tar.gz | 52.38K | 45a593cca60e2726b58bfc2a9c2555f7 |
| epsmerge-2.1.0.tar.bz2 | 47.04K | e193bac97a2d33c4f4863741cd2ab1b5 |
| epsmerge-2.2.0.tar.gz | 59.22K | 8cbf0ebf409a64235ac8dbabd88dbd0e |
| epsmerge-2.2.0.tar.bz2 | 49.76K | 56b735e66567dedc1f908226688fb498 |
| epsmerge-2.2.2.tar.gz | 64.15K | 4f885e53b818de8094bb42704bb58c6a |
| epsmerge-2.2.2.tar.bz2 | 54.14K | 0e336516dcf994f6e0f6239075ccf3c5 |
gunzip -c epsmerge-2.?.?.tar.gz | tar xf -
As of version 2.0.0, you should be able to unpack the script
somewhere and then create a symlink from a directory in your path
(say, /usr/local/bin, or possibly ~/bin)
to the main script (the one called epsmerge).
ln -s /where/I/unpacked/epsmerge/epsmerge /usr/local/bin/epsmerge
epsmerge requires perl 5. It is designed (or at least intended) to run straight out-of-the-box on any Perl version 5.000 or higher without requiring any downloads from CPAN.
Some technical information about epsmerge (which you don't need to know about to use epsmerge).
ps2eps.c is a c program for extracting pages from a PS file as EPS files (recall that EPS files cannot span more than one page). (I didn't write this and I didn't test it, but some people have asked me and if you think this would solve a problem for you then go ahead and try it.)
update is a tiny Perl script that looks at the .fig files in the current directory and the .eps files in the same directory. If, say, foo.fig exists but foo.eps either does not exist or is older than foo.fig, then it creates foo.eps by calling fig2dev. It also skips the .fig file if it was created with xfig 3.2 since my university's fig2dev couldn't handle those. (OK, you could do almost the same thing with makefiles, but you already have Perl, don't you?)
See also:
Feedback, comments, suggestions, and patches are welcome. epsmerge is pretty much a spare-time project (although I need it for a paper I am currently writing (update: article finally submitted!)), so it is not always under "active development". My email address is
Postscript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.
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