Re: Necessity of epstool?

[Ben Abbott]

On Jan 10, 2012, at 5:41 PM, Jussi Lehtola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> when using the -depsc switch in print I noticed the warning 
> 
> warning: print.m: epstool binary is not available.
> Some output formats are not available.
> 
> However, I didn't find any differences (except for the timestamps) in
> the generated eps file after I installed epstool.
> 
> What is epstool used for in Octave?

epstool is currently needed if you'd like to add a tiff preview or tighten the 
bounding box around the figure contents.

While discussing on the bug below ...

        https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35259

... we found that ghostscript can be used to crop the bounding box.  
Unfortunately, filtering eps files through ghostscript breaks psfrag support. 
We don't formally support psfrag now, but many people (like me!) use psfrag to 
all text to be rendered using LaTeX fonts.

> Should we take the time to make it available by default (installed alongside 
> Octave) in Fedora?

How would that work ?

Ben