[OS X TeX] I do like ps4pdf

[Herb Schulz]

Howdy,

The ps4pdf that comes with Gerben's i-installer does work out of the box but
you've got to know the sequence of things you've got to do. The Makefile
that comes with the sample does it but the best documentation is Table 2
from the TUGBoat article available as a .pdf file from

 <http://www.perce.de/LaTeX/ps4pdf/>.

I've written a TeXShop engine file to do the basic work and a single final
processing (e.g., if you need BibTeX processing, etc., you'll have to add
more to the file) of a file set up for ps4pdf. Copy the text below into a
text editor and save it with UNIX line endings with the name `ps4pdf.engine'
(without the quotes of course) in ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/ and it will
show up on the drop down typesetting menu on the source window's tool bar.

#!/bin/sh
location=$(dirname "$1")
basefname="${location}/`basename "$1" .tex`"
# process the figures
latex $1
dvips -Ppdf -o "${basefname}-pics.ps" "${basefname}.dvi"
ps2pdf13 "${basefname}-pics.ps" "${basefname}-pics.pdf"
/bin/rm "${basefname}-pics.ps" "${basefname}.dvi"
#process the file (once)
pdflatex --shell-escape "$1"

This will leave the extra file file-pics.pdf, where `file' is the original
base file name without the extension. By the way, all the extra double
quotes are to take care of possible problems with directories with spaces in
their names, Sigh...

Once the figures are all the way you want them to be just compile the
document with pdflatex alone and the figures in the file-pics.pdf file will
be properly placed. Very Nice!

As far as I can tell the only time you run into ``trouble'' is if you want
to convert the figures in the file-pics.pdf file back into individual .eps
figures. Then  you've got to do something about the `seq' command.

If this can be simplifies further please let me know.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)

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