[OS X TeX] Inclusion of TIFF files

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 7 sept. 06 à 17:00, Bruno Voisin a écrit :

> Too bad, as this means I'll have to give up for now on my beloved  
> Lucida fonts: TIFF requires XeTeX, and XeTeX doesn't support  
> virtual fonts at present, which Lucida fonts requires in LaTeX.  
> I'll live with that ;-)

For those who may have been following this discussion, here's the  
outcome.

Eventually I stuck to 600 dpi TIFF bitmaps for the figures, and to  
pdfTeX as the TeX engine since XeTeX wouldn't allow the use of Lucida  
fonts. This implied conversion of TIFF to one of the graphical format  
supported by pdfTeX; I chose PDF (conversion to PNG seemed to produce  
a few artefacts).

A few surprises regarding conversion:

- I thought Preview, when opening an EPS file and saving it in PDF  
format, was simply calling /usr/bin/pstopdf. Apparently that's not  
true. When converting an EPS file of 40 MB, you get a PDF file that  
has, in the Finder's Get Info window:

"Encoding software: Apple pstopdf" and size 27 MB, when applying  
pstopdf in Terminal

"Encoding software: Mac OS X 10.4.7 Quartz PDFContext" and size 8.2  
MB, when opening the EPS in Preview and using Save As > PDF

"Encoding software: GPL Ghostscript 8.54" and size 7.3 MB, when  
applying epstopdf in Terminal

Thus, it seems Preview is more efficient than pstopdf, and almost as  
efficient as GhostScript, when converting EPS to PDF. Some  
CoreGraphics optimization?

- Similarly, when converting a TIFF file of about 2.5 MB to PDF  
format, the final size is 712 KB when opening the TIFF in Preview  
then saving as PDF, and 1.5 MB when applying tiff2ps (from libtiff)  
then epstopdf in Terminal. ImageMagick's convert results in a PDF  
file of 1.7 MB.

Thus, all in all, it seems Preview is fairly efficient at converting  
from one graphical format to another, compared with the various  
available CLI tools.

Finally, for those who may be wondering what all this bandwidth has  
been spent about: the huge EPS files which got me investigating the  
conversion to and use of TIFF files are figures 8a-f, 10a-d and 11b  
in <http://www.legi.hmg.inpg.fr/~voisin/papers/jfm4.pdf> (beware  
before clicking: 11.3 MB download).

Thanks to all those who helped,

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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