[OS X TeX] TeX graphics program on Mac

[Herbert Schulz]

On Nov 21, 2009, at 3:33 PM, Per Ting wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am a recent immigrant to Mac and MacTeX with previous relatively extensive
> experience on PC (Miktex+Winedt). For graphics I used .eps format with
> psfrag and occasional usage of PSTricks. I usually used tpx as a front end
> for PSTricks code generation. Occasionally I used jpicedt to do this. Now I
> need your hep with the following:
> 
> 1-What is the program of choice to generate PSTricks code under Mac. I know
> that tpx does not work on Mac. Is there something similar (or better!) for
> Mac with a friendly GUI and PSTricks output?
> 

Howdy,

Hmmm... don't know of anything for this. Others will chime in.

> 2-I know that most people using TeXshop, use Pdflatex to produce the pdf
> file and I am aware of the dvi+dvips+gs option with Texshop. I was wondering
> if there exists a smart direct way to use pdflatex on a source file with
> .eps, psfrag and PSTricks? I have previouslu used auto-pst-pdf but it tends
> to regenerate all the numerous pdf files for each graphic in each run even
> when they have not changed, making the process slow on big files. There is
> another option that I think is called epstool that does not have this
> problem but it does not support PSTricks. (I realize that this second
> question is not specifically a MacTeX question!)
> 
> Thanks for your help
> 
> Per

I thought pst-pdf put all the graphics into one file to be processed at once. Doing that will automatically mean that all the graphics will be processed over if any one has changed. 

There is also pdftricks (I have a version that I believe does a better job of processing and cropping each graphic---you can get it as NewPdftricks.zip at <http://homepage.mac.com/herbs2>) which is somewhat similar to pst-pdf but puts each graphic in its own file for separate processing. You have one environment in which you place all the special \usepackage arguments for the graphics processing including duplicating any font packages and the graphicx package if needed. Then you place each of the individual graphics inside another environment. For directly including eps graphics in the pdflatex document use the epstopdf package.

There is even a pdftricksmk engine (it needs to be activated --- see the documentation in ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/Latexmk/) that will do all the processing---only if it's needed---when you use the [noshell] option for pdftricks. That engine will also take care of bibliographies, indexes, cross-references, etc., automatically. Once the engine is activated you need only restart TeXShop and place the line

% !TEX TS-program = pdftricksmk

at the top of the tex file and TeXShop will automatically run that engine.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)