Dave ten Have, CEO and co-founder of Ponoko has written a post for us on his take on the EPS file format and it’s importance in regards to using Ponoko. We’ve had a few questions about it so I think this is really timely. Thanks Dave!

When choosing file formats it is a fine balance between utility, ubiquity and availability. The utility lies in the question about whether or not the file can do what you want. The ubiquity lies in how many other tools use the file format. The availability lies in the hoops you have to jump though to get access to the file format. When creating the Ponoko service we looked a bunch of formats and settled on EPS (PDF, SVG and DXF were the other contenders).

EPS is a good format in that it is well supported in a lot of our target tools and it is has the accuracy that we need to produce products for our end users. The downside is that it is a bit used and abused. In all our testing we’ve had a great success rate with EPS in generating an end result that our users are happy with. Furthermore we’re into the game of remixing industrial design and to do that we need a file format that can be easily shared, again EPS has done us proud in that process.

The only area where we’ve had problems is with the Adobe CS suite of tools. Illustrator is a great product which I have had a crush on for years. I used version 10 as part of my demo at TechCrunch. When Adobe released later versions of the product they did something to the EPS file format that made it readable in only Adobe products - essentially making the file impossible to read in tools like GhostScript. This is a sad state of affairs because there is a vibrant eco-system of tools that sit in this space and now there are EPS files that are more equal than others. Pragmatically, Adobe are free to do what they want with the EPS format - they own it, but it causes a little heart ache. The tools I love are not playing nicely.

What does this mean for Ponoko users?

Well it means that you need to be a bit selective about the tools you use to generate your EPS files. This is what we recommend (*):

- Adobe Illustrator version 10 and lower (generally be a little more paranoid and save the EPS file as version 8 )
- Corel Draw
- Inkscape (check out this commentary about using Inkscape with Ponoko)

The aim for Ponoko is support a broad base of tools (we don’t want to get into the tools game) and we’re working hard on a solution to the CS curve ball. I hope to be able to announce something in the next little while. The obvious question is whether or not we’d be supporting other file formats. The answer is ‘yes’, but it’s a big task and is something that will take a little time.

(*) Please feel free to make your own recommendations.