[OS X TeX] [OT] Manuscript Revision Management etc.

[Maarten Sneep]

On 20 Sep 2005, at 22:47, Jung-Tsung Shen wrote:

> How's Metapost compared to (1) postscript and/or (2) Mathematica +
> Illustrator (post processing)? Is it a personal preference or deeper
> than that?

metapost is a drawing language that feels like a companion to TeX. It  
can be hard to use, and there aren't nearly as many manuals available  
for metapost as for (La)TeX. It is fairly easy to create graphs in  
metapost, and the main advantage is that it is near trivial to add  
labels to your figures, using the same fonts and typesetting power as  
you use in the rest of your work (the labels are done using tex,  
latex, context, …).

> Also, for the journals to which I submit papers, they all require .eps
> format for figures. Will metapost produce .eps output natively?

The output from metapost is eps, but the fonts can be tricky (since  
eps does not include fonts, the fonts must be available on the system  
which further processes the files). I have some instructions on how  
to translate a pdf into an eps, without relying on the availability  
of fonts. These instruction were posted to the list some time ago,  
but I can post them again if needed. The instructions were tested  
with the helpdesk of Elsevier, and should work for all Elsevier  
journals (and presumably other journals as well).

> Is .eps for historical reason, or it's indeed better than other
> format, say, PDF for embedded figures?

eps is understood, or at least included properly, by many  
applications. That doesn't mean it can't deliver a strong headache -  
especially with font issues.

pdf includes all fonts, and can be more robust in many ways -  
including the ability to check that everything is there before  
starting that expensive printing run.

pdf files can lead to multiple inclusion of (partial) fonts in the  
output of pdftex. Since metapost output is converted by pdftex, it  
can take the fonts into account, and this produces smaller and more  
efficient files. eps files cannot be used by pdftex directly.

Maarten------------------------- Info --------------------------
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