[pdftex] Why does pdflatex needs pictures?

[jonathan d p ferguson]

hi.

On Jan 12, 2011, at 1:01 PM, HHa wrote:

> Hi,
> I got a tex-file from a friend without the pictures that belong to the file. pdflatex 
> refuses to work because it misses the pictures. Other latex-Programs work, producing 
> empty frames for the pictures.
> What can I do?

At the risk of re-stating the obvious-to-developers:

1. Comment out the offending \includegraphics lines (to not have the pictures in your compiled work). (Thanks for the quick answer, Reinhard Kotucha.)

2. Say: \usepackage[draft]{graphicx} or \usepackage[demo]{graphicx} in your preamble. See: http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/required/graphics/grfguide.pdf

3. Better option: Get your friend to send you an archive of the relevant files, including the pictures. 

4. Possibly the best option: Have your friend place all of the TeX source material (input files, graphics, metapost/metafont/etc.) in a version control repository. git works quite well [1]. Subversion works well too [2]. 

Use git to collect and version all of the source files, including the graphics (PNG) files. There is a very strict line between input-file  (LaTeX/TeX etc) and compiled output (PS, DVI, PDF) when using TeX and related files. 

[1] http://www.git-scm.com/
[2] http://subversion.apache.org/

I hope that helps.

have a day.yad
jdpf