[OS X TeX] [OT] (super)size of eps/pdf figures

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 04:20:26PM -0400, Themis Matsoukas wrote:
> I have this figure which I saved in Illustrator as eps, and which is  
> 1.6 MB. The pdf version of the figure that's created when I run  
> pdflatex is 180 KB (yes, "K"). If I open this pdf figure in  
> Illustrator and simply save it as eps, it blows up to 1.4 MB (yes,  
> "M"). The problem is, I have 4 figures like that I need to upload to  
> a server along with my latex source, but I can't b/c the figures are  
> huge. (The server is supposed to assemble my latex file and its eps  
> figures to create a pdf output.)
> 
> -Is there a way to create lean eps files, either from a fat eps file  
> or from a lean pdf?

Try pdftops from the xpdf suite; you can download an osx version
from http://users.phg-online.de/tk/MOSXS/

pdftops is a cli utility. It has an -eps option and works pretty
well. If you want a gui instead, have a look at my epspdf script
which you can download from http://tex.aanhet.net/epspdf/
This script likes to have pdftops available and definitely needs
Ghostscript, for which there exists an iPackage.

> -Does it make sense that size increases by a factor of 8 by merely  
> saving from pdf to eps?
> 
> I was curious so I saved an empty file (an empty 11x8.5 page) in  
> Illustrator as eps. The resulting file is 380 KB(!)

An earlier discussion on this list suggested saving to an older
version of Illustrator eps, and deleting unused swatches, if you
prefer to save from Illustrator.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg
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