[tex-live] Graphics formats ..

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Greg Bennett <gwbennett at sentex.ca> wrote:

> Good day, from Greg Bennett.
> I am moving TeX projects to Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.4. I have built
> TeXworks which
> uses tex-live as underlying engine.
>
> Many of these projects involve diagrams which have been
> created as .eps files under Adode; they have been included gracefully under
> Windows (MikTeX)
> and MacOS (TeXshop).
>
> Running a small example to test my new installation using pdflatex, I
> receive the message
>  unknown graphics extension .eps
> or
>  unknown graphics extrension .ps
> if I copy x.eps to x.ps.

pdf(la)tex expects figures pdf format.   There are macros that will do
the conversion
"automagically", but that means running external programs from TeX and is a
potential security problem, so may be disabled in the configuration you have.

> I note that as the precessing reaches the commands to deal with the graphics
> file, there is
> the message
>  loading MPS to PDF converter (version 2006.09.02)

MPS is metapost, which produces "flat" postscript that can be
translated to pdf without the need for a full postscript interpreter.

> Perhaps this is a format to which I need to convert the .eps files.
> I have poked about in such documentation as I can find; so far I have not
> seen any sections
> dealing with the importing of graphics files .. so I shall be grateful for
> pointers, assistance,
> advice.

I general, I recommend converting .eps to .pdf independently of TeX.
This is a task that is often needed by people who have never heard of TeX,
so there are lots of good tools supported by a larger community, including
ImageMagick (convert), ghostscript (most converters use ghostscript)

If you use the 3rd party tools you have full control over the conversion.
Issue to watch for are color models (some tools insist on converting
everything to RGB colors), image compression (some tools use jpeg
which may not be appropriate, e.g., with line art), and media box (some
tools insist on generating output for some fixed paper size).

TeX Live does include epspdf, epstopdf, and sometimes eps2pdf.  For
a GUI front end, look for epspdftk (requires ruby).

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia