epssplit is a program that will split an encapsulated postscript (EPS) file into smaller EPS files. This is useful if you make a poster as an EPS file but the printer cannot handle that paper size. Use epssplit to split the file into printer-managable chunks, print them out, and glue the whole thing back together. The files can be written as several EPS files, or as one big (non-encaspulated) postscript file. epssplit will do its very best to minimize the number of pages.
epssplit should run on any Perl from version 5.0 and up, and (probably) only on Unix (I could change that, but there has been no demand for it).
As I tend to move around a bit these days, the canonical and thoroughly recommended way of finding the latest release of epssplit is through freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/). Find the appindex section and look in section Console/Text Utilities.
Note: the preferred form of the epssplit documentation is the HTML file (epssplit.html), preferably viewed with a browser that can display graphical images (or with a separate image viewer). These can all be found in the docs directory. However, I have stopped distributing GIFs with the documentation and distribute it instead with PNGs and JPGs, for mainly political reasons. See the following URL for details:
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/Gif.html
Since this software is supposed to be free in the GNU sense, then so
should the documentation.
Of course, the POD and the original FIG files are still in the devel
directory; you can convert them to what you want.
This program is distributed under the GNU General Public License. In particular, there is no warranty of any kind. Please refer to the file COPYING for details.
Comments, bug-reports, patches, remarks, etc, are very welcome. I can be reached at jens@cabezon.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk (hopefully)
**** INSTALLATION **** **** ****
epssplit is distributed as several files: the main file and several files with .pm extension (Perl modules). If you use epssplit often, you may consider writing a script telling Perl where to find epssplit. On a UNIX system your script could look like this (one line):
/usr/bin/perl -I/home/foo/epsm/ /home/foo/epsm/epssplit $@
assuming you unpacked epssplit in the directory /home/foo/epsm and that perl is in /usr/bin. Make the script executable (with chmod) and put it in your path. If the script is called epssplit then you can go to your favourite EPS directory and split away by just writing epssplit (plus all the options and filenames).
An alternative method (as of 1.0.2; slightly experimental) is to create a symlink to the perl script from some directory in your path. Say you unpacked epssplit in /usr/local/perl/scripts and you want to run epssplit from /usr/local/bin.
Here's what to do: check that the file epssplit in /usr/local/perl/scripts/epssplit-X.X.X (where X.X.X is the version number) is executable (if not, chmod a+x it), and that the first line points to perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
If your perl happens to be in /usr/local/bin/, you'd need to change the first line accordingly. The -w switch is not strictly necessary; it is there because epssplit runs strict (if it functions correctly there should be no warnings). Then create the symlink:
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s /usr/local/perl/scripts/epssplit-X.X.X/epssplit epssplit
If all goes well, epssplit will use the symlink to find out where it lives.
Postscript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.