epsepstool
I know that this issue is not LATEX, but I think that it´s usefull for me and for others, because .eps is very used with latex.
I have 15 .eps files of 4 MB, and I note that it´s a little heavy to the viewer and to the compile to PDF.
How could I reduce this size without lossing many quality.
I use imagemagick sometimes.
Here is an example file https://www.dropbox.com/s/7n9hlpszm7m10jc/p01.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:
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.
\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}
I had the same problem and my solution was: in "Tools -> Preferences -> Converters" consider the "LaTeX (pdflatex) -> PDF (pdflatex)" converter and set
latex=pdflatex
in "Extra flag". If this will not work, delete the converters section in your ./lyx/preferences file (in Linux) and restart LyX.
Best Answer
There are two reasons why
epsfiles produced by Mathematica (such asp01.epslinked in your question) are often excessively large. The first is specific to Mathematica, but the second seems to be common to a few applications that generate postscript images.1: Some methods for exporting images (such as right-clicking on the image) will include a large amount of data as comments, in case the file should be loaded back into Mathematica. Use the the Export command to avoid this.
2: Mathematica shades regions in a truly absurd way, using a huge number of small polygons where a few larger ones would do instead. A utility called polygone deals with this by merging shapes that share a common edge.
A version of your file
p01.epsthat has been processed by polygone 4 (and had the excess comments removed) is available here (409Kb).EDIT
Prompted by @Bernard's answer, I should point out that the best reduction is usually achieved by converting to
pdfafter processing with polygone. Converting the file produced by polygone usingepstopdfresults in a 123Kb image. Not bad when starting from 4.6Mb.EDIT 03/07/2014
Version 4 of polygone is now available.