[protext] Questions

[Peter J. Huber]

Hi Karl,

Thanks! But it seems that things are highly installation dependent, 
and on the output options you choose. My experience was quite 
different from yours!

Perhaps I should explain that in my old age, I had to learn TeX and 
LaTeX earlier this year, because equations are an absolute pain with 
Word (but almost everything else, for example tables, seems to be a 
pain in LaTeX!), and I no longer have a secretary, to whom I had been 
able to delegate LaTeX tasks in the past. I would like to get .pdf 
output, with minimal aggravation.  And I'd hate to do external conversions.

Here is some advice from an old fogey (I am older than Donald Knuth). 
In my opinion, TeX and LaTeX are more user-unfriendly than necessary. 
Some 30 years ago, I did some software development myself, for 
interactive data analysis. Very early on, I learned the hard way that 
it is absolutely essential to provide defaults whenever possible, and 
to help the user rather than to produce errors and aborts. I know 
that this is not easy. And I now found out to my surprise that the 
TeX-people are yet to learn this lesson! For example: if you include 
graphics, then the software should choose a sensible default location 
and size (typically: fit on the page), and if possible, print the bb 
chosen as a warning (so that one can adjust it).

Here are some examples of the mess produced by my installation of TeX:

With the output option LaTeX  => PDF in TeXnicCenter, my installation 
recognizes .jpg, but refuses everything else (I tried .eps, .bmp and .tif)

However, I then could get .eps to work *without* converting it to 
.pdf first, namely by using the output option LaTeX => PS => PDF. 
This works with both .eps and .jpg, but not with .bmp and .tif. But 
it produces only B/W output (this is a problem with the conversion of 
graphics to PostScript).

With LaTeX  => DVI output, it worked with .eps, .jpg and .bmp, but my 
.tif example (which works fine with Word) produced a fatal PostScript 
error. This variant can do color.

Yours,
Peter
.







At 00:46 11.06.2007, Karl Berry wrote:
>Hi Peter,
>
>I can't answer your first question, having never used miktex or
>texniccenter, but as for your second:
>
>     (2) Is there any easy way (as in Word) to include different graphics
>     (eps, jpg, tiff, bmp) in a single document?
>
>You can include common formats *except* eps in a pdflatex document with
>the normal \includegraphics (or whatever).
>
>You have to convert eps to pdf first (Word must do that for you behind
>the scenes).  One Windows program to do that conversion is here:
>http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/epspdf/
>
>One short introductory article on graphics and TeX is here:
>http://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb26-1/hoeppner.pdf
>
>Hope this helps,
>karl
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