[XeTeX] Inlined images?

[Ross Moore]

Hello Jérôme,


On 11/04/2011, at 7:10 PM, Jérôme Etévé <jerome.eteve at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all!
> 
> I generate automated LaTeX code quite a lot and always find myself
> having to write to external temporary files to include images in my
> documents (using graphicx).
> 
> So here's my question:
> 
> Is it possible to embed something like base64 encoded image data
> inlined in LaTeX?

Base64 is not an image format. Rather it is a way to encode binary data using text characters, so that it can be reliably transferred using email or other protocols designed for text transfer, that would otherwise not preserve all of the binary bytes. See Wikipedia for specific details.

So to get an image which can be placed in a PDF for viewing, you need to decode the base64 data anyway. It is better that you do this once when creating the PDF, than having anyone reading you document having to do it each time they want to view the image.
 Besides, by using only 64 of the 256 possible byte codes, the base64 version can be up to 4 times the size of the binary version. Thus you really want to decode it anyway.

Of course if you just want to include the files as attachments to the PDF document, without any preview, then you can certainly do this using LaTeX. (But then you would probably have asked a different question.)


> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Jerome.
> 
> -- 
> Jerome Eteve.

Hope this helps,

       Ross