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Generating eps figures from LaTeX

(5 posts)

  1. mk
    Member

    Hello all,

    I frequently use LaTeX to draw (vector) graphics (in particular, I've been using PSTricks). According to the guidelines of a philosophy journal (Studies in History and Phil of Science), you should submit your figures as separate eps files. At the PSTricks website, they suggest you to use the pdftops utility so that you can convert your pdf figure directly to eps. Everything works fine except that some features that appear in the original pdf file are lost when I convert it to eps (in particular, the font changes and some drawings simply disappear). I also tried to use Inkscape (my idea here was to import the figures in pdf format into Inkscape so that I could later export them as eps files). However, the resulting eps file has exactly the same problems (font changes + some drawings disappear).

    So my main question is: does anyone know of a better way of exporting pdf to eps? Is there any option (in either Inkscape or pdftops) that I'm missing?

    Also any comment that could help me understand what is going on here (e.g., why the font used in the pdf file is not preserved once converted to the eps format) would be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you very much.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  2. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    I think your first option could be to email Studies and see if they can't accept pdf pictures directly. That would certainly be the easiest option.

    Or try to compile to PS rather than PDF. So don't use pdflatex, but use latex+dvips to generate ps figures directly...

    Posted 1 year ago #

  3. mk
    Member

    Thank you very much Seamus for your suggestions.

    About trying to compile to PS (rather than PDF) the only problem I have is that I'd like to crop the figures and the way I usually do this is via the PDFCrop utility (I need a PDF then). For this reason, I converted my tex file to pdf, cropped the PDF figure, and use pdftops to get a PS file. The PS file I get is perfect but when I convert it to EPS (via pstoeps) I have the same problems. But the good news is that I found a way of making it work.

    From the PDF I used the pdf2svg utility, and using Inkscape I got the eps file (for command line lovers, you can use "inkscape file.svg -E file.eps"). The resulting eps figure does not have the problems I was having.

    But I wonder why that happens. Everything seems like a black box to me. If someone has an explanation of why that happens or someone knows of an alternative way of getting eps figures (without loosing data), I'm more than glad to hear.

    Thanks!

    Posted 1 year ago #

  4. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    That's interesting. I wonder what pdf2svg + inskcape is doing differently from pdftops + pstoeps...

    Posted 1 year ago #

  5. Kevin Klement
    Key Master

    pdftops has an -eps flag, and you should be able to use it to convert PDF to EPS directly. If you still have problems, try posting a sample here we can play aorund with.

    Posted 1 year ago #

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