Both are vector graphics (typically) and both can be imported painlessly into a pdflatex document (so let's say we ignore dvi for this question).
What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? What should I use?
[Tex/LaTex] Which figure type to use: pdf or eps
best practicesepsgraphicspdfpdftex
Related Solutions
For photos, screenshots and such bitmap graphics, you could use their native format (to preserve quality) if it's jpeg or png. Otherwise convert those pictures to png or at least to lossless jpg.
For drawings, plots and diagrams you better use a vector image format, because it can be scaled without quality loss. Possible vector formats are pdf and ps.
It also depends on which compiler you use: latex or pdflatex. The latter has some benefits like better justification because of microtypographic enhancements and it natively supports jpg, png and pdf, and you can use ps if converted to pdf.
My usage order with pdflatex is
- pdf - for example output of other programs
- ps - PSTricks or program output, then I use ps2pdf to go to 1.
- png - screenshots, bitmap graphics (if necessary convert to png)
- jpg - only if it's already the source format because jpg often uses lossy compression
Without pdflatex the question is not very interesting, latex supports only eps, conversion of bitmap images to eps is often not satisfying.
I summarize my findings. Hopefully others will find it useful.
Since EPS and TIFF figures were allowed, opening the EPS file in Gimp with 600dpi (with antialiasing and color/bw depending on the figure) and saving as TIFF with LZW compression made an importable figure. Despite the bitmap size of 4000x1600 and such, the file size was comparable to that of the EPS figure and looks nice.
For some reason, trying to achieve the same with ImageMagick's
convert -density=600resulted in weird files, sometimes with monstrous sizes.As @JosephWright suggested, I tried going via dvips to produce the eps. The problem is that dvips sets wrong bounding box: either it produces non-EPS file, thus having entire page as bbox, or, with
-E, the bbox is too small (according to the man page, it computes the boox only from glyphs, but not from lines and other graphics which might show up in the figure).The solution was to use
dvips -Eto produce EPS file with a wrong bounding box, and then fix it with epstool (in Debian, packageepstool), as suggested by @percusse. It requires a temporary EPS file (I used the.foo.epssuffix), and the setting for tikz looks like this:\usetikzlibrary{pgfplots.external} \tikzexternalize[] \tikzset{external/system call={latex \tikzexternalcheckshellescape -halt-on-error -interaction=batchmode -jobname "\image" "\texsource" && dvips -E -o "\image".foo.eps "\image".dvi && epstool --copy --bbox "\image".foo.eps "\image".eps && rm "\image".foo.eps "\image".dvi }}The resulting EPS is indeed importable into Word, but it is ugly (probably due to no antialiasing) and rather unusable.
Verdict:
EDIT - gold winner: open in IrfanView, copy, paste into Word directly (thanks to Joseph for the suggestion; I could not do that in my case)
silver winner: have Gimp (ghostscript) do the rendering, save as TIFF and import to Word as bitmap; word is not able to render the EPS nicely, even if it is able to load it.
avoid conferences where submissions must be in Word.
Best Answer
Use PDF. EPS cannot be imported directly by pdftex but must be converted using something like
epstopdf. These conversion procedures will often cause unwanted changes to the graphics, such as lossy JPEG encoding of embedded bitmap images. Pdftex will include PDF files directly without making any changes (except for unifying fonts, and even that can be disabled if needed), so you can have complete control over the final result by generating a PDF which is exactly as you want it (assuming your image editing software gives you control over image encoding lossiness, colour spaces, etc).