I need to turn a few scanned PDF pages into EPS for a LaTeX paper due Friday, but the output keeps coming out blurry. Which converter has worked best on mostly-text scans?
Honestly, check the DPI on the original scan first. Converting to EPS won’t make a low-res raster image sharp, to be fair. If the scan is clean, pdftops usually gives me the crispest result without blurring the text.
For scanned pages, I would try Poppler’s pdftops -eps first, since it usually preserves the embedded scan instead of resampling it. If it is still blurry, the scan itself is probably low resolution; exporting or rescanning at 600 dpi helps, but EPS cannot restore missing detail. If possible, use the original PDF directly with pdflatex instead of converting.
I am not sure which one is best for LaTeX but fwiw Ghostscript at 300 dpi made my scanned receipts less blurry. I learned that the hard way with online converters. What device are you converting on?