[Tex/LaTex] a good workflow for importing and cropping EPS images

epsgraphicsworkflow

I would like to be able to import an EPS file in to LaTeX while using some 3rd party image viewer/editor to quickly find crop coordinates. What are some good free tools for this? GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free program that works on all major platforms, but it is not a vector graphics editor; will it work? It appears that you can choose any resolution with GIMP when you import. Additionally, since an EPS file is a vector graphics file, are there native units that LaTeX will recognize?

Best Answer

Method A: Dealing directly with PostScript

Since you're dealing with PostScript images, one option might be to use GhostView; I've done so successfully in the past. As an example, consider tiger.eps.

Open tiger.eps using GhostView.
Show the bounding box if you wish to see the extent of the existing whitespace:
Position the cursor on to identify the left, bottom, right and top coordinates. In my example, these are l b r t = 15 175 564 743.
Open tiger.eps and find the lines starting with %%BoundingBox in the "preamble":
```
%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-1.2
%%BoundingBox: 1 2 611 792
```
Update this to incorporate the new bounding box:
```
%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-1.2
%%BoundingBox: 15 175 564 743
```
There may also be a %%HiResBoundingBox entry, which you can update accordingly.
Refresh the view in GhostView which now shows the cropped bounding box:
Include as usual via \includegraphics, since the bounding box has been permanently updated. If you don't want to update the EPS permanently, you can also use
```
\includegraphics[...,bb=15 175 564 743, clip=true...]{tiger}
```
in your document.

Method B: Cropping via PDF

Use the command-line conversion
```
epstopdf tiger.eps
```
which produces tiger.pdf.
Use pdfcrop
```
pdfcrop tiger.pdf
```
which produces tiger-crop.pdf.
Convert back to EPS using
```
pdftops -eps tiger-crop.pdf tiger.eps
```
to overwrite tiger.eps with a now-cropped version:

New bounding box resembles
```
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 548 576
```
which is marginally different to the manual way described in Method A (which yielded a width of 564 - 15 = 549; height of 743 - 175 = 568).

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] What are good ways to convert EPS to PDF

epstopdf, of course, which is what the epstopdf package relies on. (If you used the package there would be no need to convert.)

Or is that what you meant by eps2pdf? I've never noticed any problems with it.

I suppose you could also try Inkscape; I think it does have some batch functions, perhaps even command-line options for conversion, even though it is principally a GUI app.

EDIT: Judging by the inkscape manual, you could just do:

inkscape --export-pdf=output.pdf input.eps

EDIT2: Actually, you might need to use SVG input for inkscape export on the command-line; I'll look into this a bit more. You could do it through the GUI, though.

[Tex/LaTex] Everyday LaTeX and workflow

Having written numerous documents of all lengths (from short letters, through to 'books' in excess of 100 pages- perhaps worth noting that I've not used a word-processor at all in years), my suggestion is that the beauty of LaTeX is to avoid most manual typesetting. When I start a longer document, I typically take the following approach:

Setup a LaTeX file for my overall book, writing any preamble that I'm sure I'm going to require.
Roughly draft the book into chapters, splitting each new chapter into its own file - a single large LaTeX file is far too large and unwieldy for a large project. These files are then included in my main file. (As an aside, I typically comment out all the includes but the one I'm working on at any given time.)
I then write the chapters, including any special formatting as I write. If I don't do it then, I typically forget where it goes. As a beginner, this may require you to compile the document repeatedly to make sure you're getting the desired output. As you become more experienced, you will do less of this.
Depending on the nature of the project, the first guess at choosing chapters may or may not be correct, it's easy to add and remove as you go along, so this may be required.
Once I'm finished writing, I return to fix any more significant problems, things like overfull hboxes, and tweaking the location of images if LaTeX hasn't quite done what I want.
Once this is done, I can return to the preamble and make any changes to finalise the document, generate the index, and other 'last minute' tasks.

In all cases, I try and limit the control I take from LaTeX to a minimum, if I wanted to typeset the item by hand I'd use something like InDesign. Typically this means using a good set of document classes, or a preamble that structures the document appropriately.