[pdftex] Re: eepic and pdflatex

[Jorma Laaksonen]

Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard at kammer.uni-hannover.de> writes:

> >>>>> "Don" == Don Robinson <drrobin at ilstu.edu> writes:
> 
>     > Is there any way I can use the eepic package and create pdf
>     > files that show these lines?  I am using the current TeXLive
>     > 5.0.
> 
> As Marc van Dongen said, the best way would be to use metapost.
> 
> If you already have a lot of graphics done with eepic, you could use
> dvips and epstopdf:
> 
> 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).

Hello!

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.

When I followed your guidelines I managed to produce pdf files that
look and print good with Acrobat Reader 4.05/Linux.  Also, when
such pdfs are \includegraphics{}ed in my document they look good
on the screen, but they don't print on paper!

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.

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...) 

eepic.tex:
==========
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{epic,eepic}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
.\par. % these are here only to help "dvips -E" manage the bounding box
\begin{picture}(100,100)(0,0)
\thicklines \path(0,0)(100,0)(100,100)(0,100)(0,0)
\put(50,70){\makebox(0,0)[c]{Hello}}
\put(50,30){\makebox(0,0)[c]{World!}}
\end{picture}
.
\end{document}


text.tex:
=========
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics{eepic}
\end{document}


Here is what I do to see problem:
=================================

%> latex eepic
%> dvips -E eepic
%> epstopdf eepic.ps -o=eepic.pdf
%> pdflatex text
%> acroread text.pdf

After that I see a boxed Hello World! message but printing it looses
the text.  

Is there someone out there who is able to print that ?  Or, is there
a solution to this problem ?

Yours,

Jorma Laaksonen

-- 
Jorma Laaksonen                                 email: jorma.laaksonen at hut.fi
Dr. of Science in Technology, Docent            http://www.cis.hut.fi/jorma/
Laboratory of Computer and Information Science  tel. +358-9-4513269
Helsinki University of Technology               fax. +358-9-4513277
P.O.Box 5400, Fin-02015 HUT, Finland            mob. +358-50-3058719