Re: eps to pdf images

["George N. White III" <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Mon, 10 May 2004, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Tobias wrote
>
> >esides Hans methode (texexec --pdf --fig=c yourfile.jpg) I want to remark
> >that PDFTeX is able to include JPEG and PNG graphics directly thus you do
> >not need to convert them. Actually, Hans methode does the conversion from
> >JPEG to PDF  simply by including the JPEG in TeX. (Old versions of PDFTeX
> >also supported TIFF, but there are legions of TIFF subformats of which
> >only a fraction was supported. Consequently, TIFF had been dropped.)

PNG also has unsupported subformats.

> fyi: inclusion of pdf is faster, so if you process the document often, it
> makes sense to convert png to pdf

And, as a general strategy, converting all images and figures to pdf
(even if the format is supported by pdftex) has several advantages:

1. the inclusion of pdf requires no format conversions, so is "lossless".
If you are happy with the pdf version of your image it will look the
same in the document

2. there are many good tools to manipulate images and generate PDF's, but
there is only one pdftex.  Those other tools get the benefits of a much
larger user base and competition from similar tools, so in general they
are more capable and reliable than pdftex.  In particular, many packages
(OpenOffice.org, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop) can now export directly
to PDF, thus avoiding many conversion steps.

3. those tools offer more control (resampling, color adjustment) than
you can get using pdftex, and you can use different settings for each
image rather than rely on some global "default" setting.

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