There are two kinds of people in this world – those who are always on the lookout for the nifty tools that will convert the xyz image format to Encapsulated Postscript (eps) and those who have no clue what Encapsulated Postscript is.
Why do we like to convert all kinds of shit to eps so much? It’s because of LaTex. And while the pdflatex has support for most non-postscript image types, you sometimes want to compile your documents into postscript format first for best results.
On most unix systems converting between back and forward between common graphical formats and eps is relatively trivial. There are dozens of small command line apps (most likely developed by and/or for frustrated LaTex users) that will for just that for you. Many systems will actually ship with decent assortment of these tools out of the box.
However if you find yourself editing LaTex documents on windows you might be lacking these tools. Or not. I found myself in this situation the other day, and I was able to find windows port of jpeg2eps as well as the port of the awesome sam2p app that works on bitmaps, png’s and bunch of other file formats. The direct link to the binaries is here.
Once you have the right tools, the rest is easy.
[tags]latex, eps, postscript, jpeg2eps, sam2p, conversion, convert to eps[/tags]
i always use GIMP to convert my images from tif’s (or whatever format) to eps files.
its free, and easy!
edd
Good point. Only thing is that Gimp takes it’s sweet time to load, and then you need to make 3-4 mouse clicks to complete the whole thing.
With the command line apps you can accomplish the same thing in seconds :)
Gimp does the job.
Gimp does the job if you habe lot of time. But what if you want to convert 100’s of images.
the third method listed within this website: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~reyzin/pictips.html
is very useful and it does not require any tool to be installed (you usually should have gsview if you don’t have adobe reader, otherwise there’s the second method)
;)
Great info thanks. Here is easiest way to convert images: Image Converters
Dora’s link may be easy, but it only converts to png, jpg and gif! The sam2ps in this article has a README that says its standalone, but then fails if you don’t have png22pbm (should this be png2pbm?). Not very excellent in my book. Guess I’ll boot Linux and run GIMP.
very useful thanks.
Hey Phil, you can run GIMP on windows too — not that you’d want to…
@ Alexmart:
GIMP does the job if you want your 2MB jpeg to become a 40 MB eps file. For instance, unlike GIMP jpeg2eps actually wraps the jpeg in Level 2 postscript instead of encoding the jpeg as text.