[texhax] Using pages from a PDF document as graphics

[William F. Adams]

On Feb 2, 2005, at 4:37 AM, Stefan Björk wrote:

> 1. Which is the best source format for figures of this kind? The 
> print-to-file alternative in Acrobat ends up in a PostScript file. Is 
> this a valid EPS file? I can convert it back to PDF with ps2pdf, which 
> saves disk space (disk space is an issue here).

Acrobat should get you all the way to a .pdf.

You can save a .ps and distill it of course to get a .pdf though.

It's also possible to set up a PostScript printer driver to create a 
.eps which can then be placed --- need to muck around w/ custom page 
sizes usually though to get the right size / margins.

If you have the full version of Acrobat one way to ensure you've got 
graphic files in synch is to get to a .pdf, crop that, then export (or 
Save As w/ more recent versions) as a .eps which will then have the 
same dimensions as the .pdf. (don't over-write a source .eps doing this 
though, since such a file isn't as readily editable).

> 2. How to crop a picture? A PDF can be cropped with pdfcrop, but this 
> ends up in a PDF version 1.4 (using pdfTeX 1.20a/MikTeX 2.4), which 
> ebb complains about when I try to get the bounding box. How do I crop 
> a EPS file and get its bounding box?

See above for one way to avoid the need to do this.

> 3. How to include a PDF so that it works in a DVI file, that is, 
> without using pdfTeX? I also use pstricks, which means trouble when I 
> use pdfLaTeX (yes, this can be solved too, but I still want to be able 
> to create DVI files and use xpdf/yap/whatever).

You would either need to use a .dvi driver in an environment which 
groks .pdf display (Mac OS X), or you need to provide your images in 
two versions, the second which supports your operating environment.

We do that last at work by default, keeping a .eps source of an image 
which can then be displayed on systems w/ Display PostScript (when I 
take jobs home to work on them on my NeXT Cube) and .pdf which is used 
here at work w/ pdftex on either Windows or Mac OS X.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
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