[Tex/LaTex] How to create PDF & EPS exactly as big as the PSTricks picture but without using pdfcrop

conversionpaper-sizepdfcropperformancepstricks

This question is made to accompany the existing question: How can I create a pdf document exactly as big as my tikz picture?.

Constraints:

It is not allowed to use pdfcrop by any means whatsoever. It is because pdfcrop takes a significant amount of time as explained in Searching for a better workflow to get a cropped PDF and EPS graphics – Stage 2.
Manually calculating a tight paper dimension and other related dimensions is not allowed. For example, the solution for the first case in this link is not allowed because the margin is manually setup to avoid the top and bottom parts get cropped accidently.
Neither BatchA.bat nor BatchB.bat is allowed because they produce big PDF and EPS files. Any variants of them might not be allowed as well. But they might be allowed if there is a way to reduce the file size, at least the same as the file size produced by latex->dvips->ps2pdf->pdfcrop.

BatchA.bat:
```
latex -interaction=nonstopmode %1
dvips  -R -t unknown -E %1 -o %1-temp.eps
epstool --copy --bbox %1-temp.eps %1.eps
epstopdf --hires %1.eps
```
BatchB.bat:
```
latex -interaction=nonstopmode %1
dvips -R -t unknown %1 -o %1-temp.ps
ps2eps %1-temp.ps
epstool --copy --bbox %1-temp.eps %1.eps
epstopdf --hires %1.eps
```

How can I create PDF and EPS exactly as big as my PSTricks picture without breaking the constraints above?

Best Answer

You can't. Not if you meanby the size of graphic you mean the rectangle around all the print. The postscript graphics are calculated by the postscript interpreter (e.g. dvips) after the (La)TeX run. So LaTeX has absolutly no chance to know where all the black or colored ink points will be.

You can try dvips -E but as the documentation says to the -E option:

Generate an EPSF file with a tight bounding box. This only looks at marks made by characters and rules, not by any included graphics. In addition, it gets the glyph metrics from the TFM file, so characters that print outside their enclosing TFM box may confuse it. In addition, the bounding box might be a bit too loose if the character glyph has significant left or right side bearings. Nonetheless, this option works well enough for creating small EPSF files for equations or tables or the like.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to create a pdf document exactly as big as the tikz picture

TikZ can do that itself. Have a look at section 63 of the TikZ documentation: “Externalizing graphics.”

This describes how all TikZ graphics in a given document can be pre-processed to speed the actual processing of a document. This results in one PDF file per TikZ graphic.

This is the (shortened) example document:

% This is the file survey.tex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphics}
\usepackage{tikz}
\pgfrealjobname{survey}
\begin{document}

In the following figure, we see a circle:
\beginpgfgraphicnamed{survey-f1}
  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \fill (0,0) circle (10pt);
  \end{tikzpicture}
\endpgfgraphicnamed

\end{document}

The following command produces the image file survey-f1.pdf from the above document, cropped to just the TikZ picture:

pdflatex --jobname=survey-f1 survey.tex

[Tex/LaTex] Searching for a better workflow to get a cropped PDF and EPS graphics – Stage 1

I would recommend method A, because the EPS files will in general be much smaller.

You noticed "bad" cropping with method A. The reason for this is subtle: your use of pstricks produces a PDF where the font used for labelling the grid (eg, the figure "3") is Helvetica and it is not embedded in the PDF. Therefore ghostscript and adobe reader have to use a subsitute font. Most viewers (including the many viewers based on ghostscript, also xpdf) will use a version of Helvetica. Adobe's viewer will substitute ArialMT (on windows at least), which is a slightly different shape and therefore gets cut off. You can check this with Adobe reader on the "fonts" tab of the "document properties" dialog. You can solve this problem by producing a file with the fonts embedded. One way to do this is to change your method A to use ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS#/prepress %1.ps %1.pdf.

Why does method B seem to be superior? Actually I was quite confused for a while because on Ubuntu the two methods do produce the same bounding box. Which is to be expected, since pdfcrop and epstool both use gs -sDEVICE=bbox to generate it. So why do you see a difference? Well, I found that the miktex version of epstopdf has a bug in it: it rounds the bounding box to an integer number of points. In this particular case this had the effect of cancelling the clipping, but in general it could make the clipping worse. I'll file a bug against miktex tomorrow, but in the meantime this is another reason to prefer method A if you are using miktex. (The miktex version of epstopdf is a reimplementation in C of the bugless original perl script).

Constraints:

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to create a pdf document exactly as big as the tikz picture

[Tex/LaTex] Searching for a better workflow to get a cropped PDF and EPS graphics – Stage 1

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