From: Eric Durant <edurant@umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Converting eps to pdf
Date: 18 Sep 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <39C644B4.28495988@umich.edu>
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I gave up on pdflatex a long time ago -- there were too many things
(packages, etc.) which worked fine in LaTeX on a variety of platforms
which pdflatex couldn't handle.  I just tried it again on a few of my
recent documents, and see that it still has many of the same issues. 
So, I cannot suggest how to fix your pdflatex graphics issues, but I
will say that I get press quality PDFs by converting LaTeX documents
using both EPS files from a variety of sources and TIFF images with the
following procedure:

* use latex/bibtex as usual to output a DVI
* 'dvips -Ppdf -ta4 dviname' to convert the DVI to PS
  * look at texmf/dvips/config/config.pdf to see what -Ppdf is doing
  * use the appropriate -t argument for your paper size
* run the resulting .ps file through Adobe Distiller to create a PDF
  * Distiller has options for graphics compression and such
    which you might want to set

As for troublesome EPS files, I've found Ghostscript and GSview to be
helpful in pointing out errors, determining bounding boxes, etc.

-- Eric Durant
   http://edurant.com/