[OS X TeX] generating eps files

[Maarten Sneep]

On 9 jun 2004, at 14:58, Kannan Moudgalya wrote:

>> For personal use, I advice you to translate all your figures into pdf,
>> if needed with the epstopdf tool on the command-line. The pdf-format
>> allows for much easier and consistent verification of the final 
>> output.
>
> I have bounding box problem with epstopdf.  As suggested by a bug-fix I
> tried to increase the numbers by 1, but it did not help.  Can anyone
> suggest where I can find the latest version of epstopdf that does not 
> have
> this problem?

i-Installer (IIRC epstopdf is part of the TeX packages, but requires 
the ghostscript package to be present). Again IIRC the symptoms you see 
are known issues in older versions of ghostscript. Of course the eps 
may be borked to begin with (or simply draw outside the given bounding 
box).

>> Now the bonus subject: getting LaTeX formatted equations into another
>> drawing application. I'll just give an example, you figure it out.
>
> Out of curiosity:  Both xfig and gnuplot give options to embed latex 
> fonts
> in the figures.  From the discussion, I guess that metapost can be used
> for the same.  Can someone tell me the advantages of using metapost 
> over
> xfig and gnuplot?  Is this comparison ok in the first place?

Different source material: metapost is drawing in text (i.e. with a 
healthy dose of the imagination to see what's going on). gnuplot is 
similar in this respect: beforehand you only know what comes out after 
a lot of trial and error. XFig is a different type of application: it 
is interactive, not batch based.

Actually the LaTeX FAQ gives yet another method of accomplishing the 
same:
see http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mpprologues

As for embedding latex fonts in figures: I wouldn't trust the results 
if tex isn't involved at some point.

Maarten

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