Files carrying a .eps suffix usually are what they say they are, but the suffix is not proof. EPS carries no raster preview unless a TIFF preview block was added at export.
| Usual MIME type | application/postscript |
| Extension | .eps |
| Written by | Adobe Inc. |
| Full name | Encapsulated PostScript |
What the file holds
ASCII PostScript: a %!PS-Adobe-3.0 header, a %%BoundingBox comment, text and drawing operators, and a %%EndDocument terminator.
The %%BoundingBox comment is what lets a DTP package place the graphic without rendering it; a missing BoundingBox is the classic reason an EPS fails to import.
Recognising the format
The format announces itself in plain text: %!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0 near the start of the file. If that string is missing, whatever produced the file is not what the extension claims.
Getting it open
Installed options: Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Inkscape, Ghostscript, LibreOffice Draw. None of them have to be the program that made the file: Universal Viewer reads it and writes nothing back.
Exporting to other formats
The targets people actually ask for are .pdf, .svg, .png, .jpg, .ai. Each one has its own page with the settings that matter: eps → pdf, eps → svg, eps → png, eps → jpg, eps → ai
Checked 2026-10-05 — M. Halvorsen.
Notes from the file library
Files of this kind are catalogued with the family named in the table above. The family groups them by what a file carries, not by the application that wrote it, which is why two extensions from the same application can sit in different families.
Two things decide whether a file can be opened on a machine that never had the application that made it: the header, which says what the container is, and the structure behind it, which says whether the contents can be read at all. The conversion guides listed on the page cover the targets that come up most often.
Format pages are rebuilt with each release of the toolset, and the review line at the bottom of the page is when an editor last checked the entry against a file. If a page disagrees with a file you have, send the first sixteen bytes and the build number to the support address and the entry is corrected in the next build.