Bad results converting PDF to EPS on Linux

Posted by Tim on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Tim
Published on 2012-12-17T11:51:50Z Indexed on 2014/06/13 9:32 UTC
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linux

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pdf

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eps

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image-conversion

I'm having some trouble converting PDFs (created by Adobe Illustrator on a Mac) to EPS. I have tried several things but I am wondering if there is a better option.

The following list is ordered by decreasing quality:

inkscape --export-area-page --export-eps=out.eps in.pdf using the graphical program Inkscape works best, but is a bit slow;
pdftops -eps in.pdf out.eps uses Poppler and works good and is fast;
pdf2ps in.pdf out.eps uses ghostscript and works ok for simple documents;
convert in.pdf out.eps uses ImageMagick and always rasterizes the image.

I haven't tested the following:

acroread -toPostScript use acroread (Linux only)

Some issues I've found:

Transparency is not supported in EPS, but instead of flattening the layers, most programs rasterize the image producing big files and ugly graphs. Inkscape does this best by only rasterizing the unsupported area.
Gradients are rendered properly by Inkscape, but Poppler somehow chops up the gradient into many shapes of different colors.
Greek symbols are seemingly not supported by Ghostscript and are rasterized (using pdf2ps).

What are your experiences for this kind of task? Did I forgot certain programs and/or command line options that improve quality?

I found some posts on this, but not a (thorough) comparison of possibilities, please correct me if I'm wrong.

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How to convert PDF to EPS? on TeX

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