[Tex/LaTex] Copying figures into LaTeX

epsgraphicsjpeg

I want to copy some figures from previous studies and use them in the introduction of my thesis.

My current procedure to do this is: print screen the necessary page from the pdf file I am interested in, copy it into paint, crop the image I want, save it as a .jpg file, convert this to a .eps file then use epstopdf in my preamble.

This is very low-tech an the resulting image quality isn't great. There must be a much better way to do this that I don't know about?!

I don't have access to Photoshop but do have access to Inkscape if that makes any difference at all.

Thanks!

Best Answer

I handle image formatting outside of latex and incorporate them directly as pdf, png, or jpg. So this is not a latex answer per se, but it may still be usefull for the production of latex document.

Inkscape

What I usually do is, if I know the image in the pdf is in vectorial format, I will open the image directly in Inkscape, delete the content I don't want, add any modification to the original image, resize the image by doing File -> Document Properties... -> Resize page to content... -> Resize, and save the result in pdf to be incorporated as is in LaTex. When the image in the pdf is not in vectorial format, I end up usually redrawing it in Inkscape anyway... The tool located in Path -> Trace Bitmap... is sometimes useful for this.

enter image description here

GIMP

Alternately, GIMP can be used to produce high quality screenshot from pdf documents. Open the pdf document with GIMP, select the page on which your image is, define the desired resolution of the image and select whether you want your image to contains anti-aliasing or not. For a thesis for example I would select a resolution of 300 or 600 dpi without anti-aliasing. For a presentation or on screen display, 100 dpi with anti-aliasing.

enter image description here

Once the page is loaded in GIMP, select the area where the image you want is located in the page with the Selection Tool. Crop the image to selection by doing Image -> Crop to Selection and save the image as png or jpg by doing File -> Export As. I usually save in png if it is a graph or if there is text in the image and save it as jpg if it is a picture.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Problem with a very heavy EPS image – scatter plot too heavy as EPS

As noted in the comments on the question, EPS is not an ideal way to store the plot. For scatter plots with many points and also for pseudo colour plots, it's a better idea to store the plot itself (without axes and annotations) as a raster graphic such as a PNG. In the case of a pseudo colour plot, this is actually minimal and no information is lost. See this answer for an example I did of one.

As a sample, I plotted random points in octave and then turned off the axes. After saving as a PNG file, I used imagemagick to trim the margins from the plot to produce scatter.png:

enter image description here

Using pgfplots I wrapped this PNG in axes, thus minimising the the space and processing required by the points in the plot. This requires the use of pdflatex rather than latex with a PNG file.

enter image description here

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{width=6cm,compat=newest}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
    \begin{axis} [
        scale only axis,        % Plot size does not include axes.
        enlargelimits=false,    % Shrink wrap the PNG.
        axis on top,            % Axes placed over PNG to avoid obscuring the lines.
        xlabel=$x$,
        ylabel=$y$,
    ]
        \addplot graphics [
            xmin=0,
            xmax=1,
            ymin=0,
            ymax=1,
        ] {scatter.png};
    \end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{A simple example.}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] Low quality in tex->dvi->ps->pdf

For the PS -> PDF step you can use ps2pdf with options to suppress resampling and lossily compressing images -dAutoFilterColorImages=false and -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode. (On windows, you may have to replace the = by #).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Problem with a very heavy EPS image – scatter plot too heavy as EPS

[Tex/LaTex] Low quality in tex->dvi->ps->pdf

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