[OS X TeX] Re: MacOSX-TeX Digest #1553 - 11/12/05

[Maarten Sneep]

On 13 Nov 2005, at 4:43, Jonathan Lubin wrote:

> Why don't you read the .eps file into TeXShop and thereby convert  
> it to .pdf? Of course this will also take forever, but it would be  
> a one-time operation, and I can only guess that the .pdf will be  
> much smaller.

I think the main bottleneck is in the screen updates, if you convert  
to pdf and open in Adobe reader, it may be possible to see the  
individual points as they are drawn (preview & texshop do the drawing  
online first, and dump the result to the screen).

I assume there are good reasons to use an eps file. What you can try,  
at least for the writing version is to convert the figure to jpeg at  
a reasonable resolution and high quality. This figure can then be  
translated into eps again (make sure you do not overwrite the  
original file, you have been warned!). You can do this with  
ImageMagick's convert. The final eps should be able to just include  
the jpeg as is, postscript level 2 can do this - others will probably  
start to tell us about the most optimal tools.

>> PS. The eps figure is merely several simple black and white curves
>> consisting of a huge amount of data points. I wonder if there's  
>> anyway
>> to compress the figure?

Converting to pdf will compress the figure, but not speed up the  
screen updates. Converting to a bitmap will remove all details you  
will not see anyway. I would recommend to use this bitmapped  
intermediate as a development version only. As far as I know, WinEdt/ 
YAP create a bitmapped cache of the figure in question and use that  
instead. TeXShop converts to pdf, and has no individual figures to  
cache.

Maarten
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