EPS

Adobe introduced EPS in 1987, developed by company founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke together with Aldus, as a way to embed a self-contained piece of PostScript artwork inside a larger document — a page layout, a print job, another illustration — without needing the receiving application to understand PostScript itself. The format solved a real problem of the era: getting vector graphics into predominantly text-based publishing tools that had no native vector rendering of their own.

The trick was the embedded preview: alongside the actual PostScript program, an EPS file typically carries a small low-resolution raster image (historically TIFF, WMF, or PICT depending on platform) purely so non-PostScript software could show something on screen, even though only a real PostScript interpreter could render the file at full quality or print it correctly.

That architecture has aged out of relevance. Adobe now describes EPS as obsolete, and outside dedicated tools like Ghostscript, essentially nothing in the modern software stack — no browser, no mobile OS, no lightweight preview library — can interpret raw PostScript directly. For a DAM, EPS assets inherited from older print archives are a clear conversion case: rendering to PDF or SVG on ingestion keeps the artwork usable, while EPS masters sit as archival-only files with shrinking practical relevance.