[OS X TeX] rtf2rtf2latex2e

[Scott Prahl]

Alain Schremmer wrote about rtf2latex2e translation

> For instance, about half of the picts were translated into eps and for
> the other ones, it said
>
>     Calling ImageMagick to convert figure to EPS...
>     convert: Unexpected end-of-file (/Users/alainschremmer/Desktop/10
>     OMTo/v1-5-4-Part2Fig21.pict).
>     * Figure conversion to EPS failed! Is ImageMagick installed?
>
> TeXshop's console said there was an error on the boldfaced line
>
>     \begin{figure}[htbp]
>     \begin{center}
>     * \includegraphics[width=4.250in,
>     height=0.764in]{v1-5-4-Part2Fig1.pict}*
>     \caption{v1-5-4-Part2Fig1.pict about here.}
>     \end{center}
>     \end{figure}

rtf2latex2e tries to use ImageMagick to convert .pict files into
.eps files.  This often fails, and moreover produces bitmapped
images which tend to work poorly.  When ImageMagick does work, it
produces an EPS file, which does not work with pdflatex.

I wrote pict2pdf to solve this problem.  It is available from

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/pict2pdf/

pict2pdf allows you to do

pict2pdf *.pict

to convert all the .pict files in a directory to .pdf format.  The
advantages of the conversion is that these are vector-to-vector
conversions and not just 300 dpi renderings.   This means that the
files are smaller and can be edited with Illustrator.

SO HOW DOES THIS HELP?  When converting files, I type

rtf2latex2e file.rtf
pict2pdf *.pict

then I open file.tex and search and replace all '.pict' with '.pdf'
before latexing the file.

Scott

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