[XeTeX] Inlined images?

[Mike "Pomax" Kamermans]

On 4/12/2011 6:31 AM, Jérôme Etévé wrote:
> I'm using LaTeX (XeTeX) to produce documents programmatically and some
> of them include images gathered from a database, so I'm looking for a
> way to embed those images in my document without having to write them
> to temporary files whilst I'm processing my LaTeX.

To follow up on Heiko's comment, a question: whether you are writing the 
images to temp files yourself, and pointing to those images in your 
LaTeX source, or whether you include them as some binary data in the 
.tex file, which is then decoded and written to temporary files by LaTeX 
so that it can include them, the intermediate result is the same: 
temporary files are going to be written to disk.

 From an editorial point of view it would be much safer to stay the 
course you are on now, making sure your code generates the .tex source 
as well as writing the images as temporary files, with a cleanup once 
LaTeX is done compiling to get rid of all the temporary files that were 
necessary during the run. LaTeX is going to generate quite a number of 
temporary files anyway (.aux, .log, .toc, etc. etc.) that need to be 
cleaned up after the compilation run, and your system is clearly capable 
of writing to disk, so I don't quite understand why writing the images 
to temp files is undesirable.

Is there a benefit to only writing a single .tex file and calling TeX 
over writing a .tex file + image files, calling TeX and then performing 
cleanup when it completes without errors?

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com