from 2.60 README:
PSTOEDIT
Copyright (C) 1993,1994,1995,1996,1997 Wolfgang Glunz, Wolfgang.Glunz@mchp.siemens.de
pstoedit converts Postscript(TM) and PDF files to other vector graphic
formats so that they can be edited graphically. See pstoedit.man or
manual.html for more details on which formats are supported by pstoedit.
The architecture of pstoedit consists of a PostScript frontend which
needs to call a PostScript interpreter like Ghostscript and the
individual backends which are plugged into a kind of framework.
This framework can be used independently from the PostScript frontend
from any other program. The framework provides a uniform interface to
all different backends. Get in contact with the author if you need
more information on how to use this framework.
It is used by the barplot command of comdraw. This uses both plotmtv to generate the plot in PostScript, and pstoedit to re-render it in idraw-formatted PostScript.