[pdftex] Re: eepic and pdflatex

[Robin Fairbairns]

> Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard at kammer.uni-hannover.de> writes:
> 
> > Put the graphics into a LaTeX file, one figure per page and disable
> > page numbering.  Process the file with latex, not pdflatex.  Then run
> > the dvi file through dvips -E -i -S1.  The parameters are explained in
> > dvips's manpage.  You will get one eps file for each page with a tight
> > bounding box.  These files can be converted to pdf with epstopdf.  You
> > can then include the pdf files into your document as usual (using the
> > grapicx package).
> 
> You don't mention here that epstopdf converts the fonts in the eepic
> graphics to Type3, which -- at least in my case -- leads to that
> the texts in the eepics won't print when included in the surrounding
> text.

you need ghostscript >=6.01 (7.00 is current); gs 5.50 and earlier
converted all but times and the like to type 3 fonts.

> Also, "dvips -E" is not sufficient to extract correct bounding boxes
> because it only finds the bounding box of the characters and rules,
> not that of the graphic elemenents.  I've instead used ps2epsi, which 
> is more accurate.

i reckon dvips -E could do better, but it would appear you're right
(though the problem's never bitten me...)

> Here is a small example that demonstrates the problem. (In my real
> setting, the eepic have been produced a long time ago with gnuplot
> and I'm not anymore able to export them in a different format...) 

that you're using eepic is irrelevant.  any font other than the "basic
laserwriter set" will exhibit this problem.