[OS X TeX] Turning eps to pdf problems

David Watson dewatson at mac.com
Mon May 22 02:32:04 EDT 2006


I didn't even know that that particular program was there, but, if I  
did I would try giving the arguments --help, -h, and then "h" in turn  
until I found one that would get the program to give me a usage  
statement. Apple utilities seem to leave off the traditional Unix  
short and long options "-" and "--" for certain utilities (e.g. tar  
xvf vs. tar -xvf). Don't ask me why. I would presume they don't  
expect people to use this utility directly, and as such, they don't  
put it in the User Manual. I think that many of the workarounds and  
troubleshooting procedures that you will find on this list are going  
to involve unix style commands, because most of the tools have been  
ported from *nix source directly. Tools like TeXShop and BibDesk that  
you may have installed on your system are "front-ends" for the  
command line tools that most of us who are familiar with TeX have  
grown accustomed to.

To a greater or lesser extent, many of us have found it easier to use  
the command line to investigate misconfigurations, as most of the  
command line utilities are very well documented (if you can deal with  
manpages, texdoc, info, etc.) and additionally versatile (again,  
assuming you have some familiarity with bash, csh, tcsh, and/or perl,  
sed, awk). If you wish to become more familiar with the command line  
utilities in general, I would recommend finding an introductory  
reference at O'Reilly, as they are fairly thorough. Google is great  
if you can put two and two together on your own, which probably wont  
happen unless you have spent some time with the command line. On the  
other hand, if you are on subscribed to this list, you have already  
taken the most important step in finding a solution to your OS X TeX  
problems.


On May 22, 2006, at 12:57 AM, Robert Bruner wrote:

> Please  excuse a newbie question (new to Mac and this list, that is)
> but how does one learn about, E.G., syntax and features, of things  
> like
>
>> /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert is another utility. To use
>> it invoke it using absolute path names, i.e. those starting with / or
>> ${HOME}, à la:
>>
>> 	/System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert -i application/postscript
>> -j application/pdf -f /path/to/file.eps -o ${HOME}/directories/ 
>> file.pdf
>
> in the absence of man pages.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bob Bruner
>
>
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