Illustrator 10 incorrectly rotates text labels on GnuPlot figures

bug-ID: ILL10-2002-01-24b

Some EPS documents created by GnuPlot, containing text labels, display correctly in Illustrator 9.02. However, when opening such files with Illustrator 10 (Macintosh, MacOS 9.1) the line-art portions of the artwork is correctly rotated to landscape, but positions for text-labels, and the labels themselves, are rotated twice, hence through 180^o.

Software Versions

• Illustrator 10
• MacOS 9.1

Reported by:

Ross Moore, 24 January 2002.

EPS files exhibiting this bug may also be subject to excessive time taken to open the file, or failure to open at all. (See Bug: ILL10-2002-01-24a.)

Example

(Click on an image to download the corresponding file.)

created with GnuPlot	distilled to PDF	resaved: (Illus9.02)	resaved: (Illus10)
fig2.ps	fig2.pdf	fig2-ill9.eps	fig2-ill10.eps
(size = 13.9k)	(size = 13.1k)	(size = 204k)	(size = 392k)

Note how with Illustrator 10 the non-text portion of the artwork has been rotated to landscape, but the text-labels and their relative positions have been rotated by 180^o. The original EPS file has Bounding-Box and Orientation comments as follows:

%%BoundingBox: 50 50 554 770
%%Orientation: Landscape

Both Illustrator 9 and Illustrator 10 rotate the artwork, but the Page Setup has to be adjusted to suit. (Note that Acrobat Distiller cannot respect the orientation comment.)

Further Information

GnuPlot-produced EPS files handle axis-ticks with labels using PostScript coding such as the following, taken from the example above:

/M {moveto} bind def  /L {lineto} bind def
/R {rmoveto} bind def /V {rlineto} bind def
/vshift -80 def
/Lshow { currentpoint stroke M 0 vshift R show } def
/Rshow { currentpoint stroke M dup stringwidth pop neg vshift R show } def
/Cshow { currentpoint stroke M dup stringwidth pop -2 div vshift R show } def

864 1599 M 63 0 V 5985 0 R
-63 0 V -6129 0 R
(-0.5) Rshow

and usages of Lshow and Cshow, similar to that of Rshow.