[tex-live] pretest: epstopdf overwrites existing files

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 12:59:07AM +0200, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> Imagine a rather naive author, trying to include an eps file in a TeX document
> compiled with pdflatex. It works the first time, she's very happy. Then she
> notice her .eps was wrong and change it. She recompiles. Nothing changes. At
> this point, she's disapointed, and starts thinking of TeX as a non-deterministic
> piece of software just like ms-word. Too bad.
> 
> A pdf generated by epstopdf is sort an intermediate file like .log, .aux, etc.
> Most .pdf files are not intermediate files. The real problem is to distinguish
> between those too kinds of pdf files. How about using a specific extension for
> auxiliary pdf files, such as .epstopdf? I think it eliminates the core problem
> of knowing whether the pdf can be overwritten or not.
>
> Of course, it would require some adaptations to the code, but it should be doable.

Already done, see previous mail about new option `suffix'.

I had also considered a different extension. However in some worlds
the extension denotes the file type. It might confuse users and
programs, if PDF files don't have the expected extension.

As some already pointed out, there is a need to check the conversion
result sometimes, caused by trouble with errorneous EPS files
(that have extension .eps, are PS, but not EPS).

BTW the option `suffix' can also be used in your sense to create
a new extension (but with multiple dots), e.g.
\epstopdfsetup{suffix=.gen}
Then `foo.eps' is converted to `foo.gen.pdf'.
It can seen as `foo' + `.gen.pdf' or as `foo.gen' + `.pdf'.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>