[OS X TeX] Converting old eps files with TeXShop

[Richard Koch]

Folks,


On May 24, 2011, at 6:27 AM, André Bellaïche wrote:

> I would like to use old eps figure files, as old as 1998, in a new LaTeX document. 
> 
> They contain text typeset in Myriad (Roma, Italic or Bold) and TeXShop does a very bad job of conversion whatever I use latex or pdflatex, or whatever I chose Ghostscript or Apple Distiller in the preferences. It does not recognize the Myriad font and use a substitution font. This means that pieces of text collides, as the substituted font is a bit larger, italic and bold are transformed into roman, etc.
> 
> Adobe Distiller Professional 8.1.3 does the same bad job.
> 
> But Preview (Aperçu in French) does a perfect conversion. The only drawback is that Preview consider any new eps file as untitled, and you have to rename it by hand, and you may only handle the files one by one, as there are 254 eps files to convert.
> 
> Does anybody know a way of
> 
> - using Preview in batch mode;
> 
> - or, alternatively, to replace Ghostscript by Preview (not Apple Distiller !) in the TeXShop preferences?
> 


TeXShop has a preference setting which determines which distiller to use when typesetting
in TeX and DVI mode. Recall that this mode calls tex or latex to typeset, dvips to convert the
resulting dvi file to postscript, and a distiller to convert the postscript to pdf.

This preference setting does not affect conversion of eps illustrations to pdf illustrations
when using pdflatex and the epstopdf package. By default, that conversion is done with Ghostscript.

You can use Apple's program, pstopdf, with the epstopdf package by adding an extra line to
your source header, after the line \usepackage{epstopdf}. The extra line should read


\epstopdfDeclareGraphicsRule{.eps}{pdf}{.pdf}{%
	/usr/bin/pstopdf #1 -o \OutputFile
}


Dick Koch