Open an EPS file without Illustrator
A logo or a print ad arrived as an .eps file and nothing on your computer or phone will show it. Drop it here: you get the preview picture stored inside the file, saved as PNG if you want it, plus its exact size in millimetres, inches and points, which program made it, the fonts it needs (and whether they travel with the file) and its spot colours.
The file is read on your device by this tab. It is not uploaded, and the PostScript in it is never run.
What it shows
- The preview picture stored in the file. An EPS is a PostScript program, which only a PostScript interpreter can draw, so the program that saves it usually adds a small picture for Word, InDesign or QuarkXPress to show on screen. Windows programs put a TIFF (or a Windows Metafile) in front of the PostScript behind a 30-byte binary header that starts
C5 D0 D3 C6; the “EPSI” kind writes a black-and-white or grey bitmap as hexadecimal comment lines between%%BeginPreviewand%%EndPreview. Both are decoded here and can be saved as PNG. It is labelled for what it is: the stored preview, not a rendering of the artwork. - The size, three ways. The
%%BoundingBoxline gives the drawing’s corners in points (1/72 inch). A box of0 0 403 2448is shown as 142.2 × 863.6 mm, 5.6 × 34 in and 403 × 2448 pt; when the file also has a%%HiResBoundingBox, the precise one is used. That is the size the artwork lands at when placed at 100 %. - Who made it. The creator line (“Adobe Illustrator(R) 16.0”, “CorelDRAW”, “Inkscape”, “GPL Ghostscript”), the Illustrator release when Illustrator wrote it (16.0.3 is Illustrator CS6), title, who it was made for and the creation date as the file writes it.
- Fonts, embedded or not. Every font named in the header or called for in the body, and whether the file carries the font program (
%%BeginResource: font) or only asks for it (%%IncludeResource: font). A font that is not embedded must be installed wherever the file is printed, or the text comes out in Courier or a substitute: the check a print shop makes before it accepts a file. - Colours. The process inks the file uses (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) and its spot colours by name, such as “PANTONE 185 C”, with the CMYK or RGB mix the file gives for each as a stand-in.
- PostScript level and layout. Language Level 1, 2 or 3 (a Level 3 file can fail on an old Level 2 printer), the DSC and EPSF versions from the first line, and where the PostScript and the preview sit in the file.
Why nothing else on your device opens it
Windows cannot show an EPS on its own, and macOS stopped in Ventura (macOS 13): Preview there no longer converts EPS or PostScript files to PDF. Browsers never showed it. Every program that draws an EPS embeds a PostScript interpreter, and almost all of them use Ghostscript, which Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus call when it is installed. Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Affinity Designer have their own. This page answers the questions you usually have before you go to that trouble: what is in it, how big it is, will the fonts be a problem, and what does it roughly look like.
For example, an Illustrator CS6 EPS from Pillow’s test suite opens here as “Encapsulated PostScript (EPS 3.0), Illustrator CS6 (version 16), 142 × 863.4 mm (5.59 × 33.99 in), TIFF preview”: a 403 × 2448 pixel, 1-bit preview, PostScript Level 2, one process colour (Black), no fonts.
What this cannot do
- Draw the vector artwork itself. That needs a PostScript interpreter. The widely used one, Ghostscript, is licensed under the AGPL, and it is not used here; no other interpreter is either. What you see is only the preview the file carries, which may be low-resolution, black and white or missing. To get the real artwork as an image or PDF, open it in Illustrator or Inkscape, or run Ghostscript:
gs -dEPSCrop -sDEVICE=png16m -r300 -o logo.png logo.eps. - Show a preview the file does not have. Many EPS files carry none: those written by Ghostscript’s eps2write and most Unix tools, and Mac EPS files, whose PICT preview lives in the resource fork and is lost when the file is copied or e-mailed. The page says so and names what will draw it.
- Draw every Windows Metafile preview. When the preview is a WMF, it is drawn only if the metafile holds a bitmap (what most programs write); a WMF made of drawing commands is named, and you can save it as a .wmf file that Windows, LibreOffice or Inkscape opens.
- Read fonts or colours the file does not declare. Fonts and colours come from the DSC comments that Illustrator, InDesign, CorelDRAW and most layout programs write. A hand-made or very old PostScript file without them shows fewer facts.
- Huge files. Files over 500 MB are not opened.