[texhax] PSfrag and SOffice problems in Latex....

Garth Milne milne at sun.ac.za
Sun May 8 10:14:13 CEST 2005


Hi
Did anyone ever get psfrag to work with ..pS or .eps coming from 
Powerpoint or OpenOffice Draw?
It  seems that (from psfrag documentation) that psfrag needs to find the 
tag inside parentheses  (), and some drivers
split the tag and print separate characters, so the string is not found.
Also, I suspect that with the heavy use of macros in powerpoint drivers, 
and possibly downloaded fonts
(I don't know the details however), that the tag can disappear into 
other code in the .eps generator.
I have looked at the .eps files from most of the drivers and can't find 
the desired tag in ().

Also, with Powerpoint 2003 that I use, The only way I can see of getting 
.ps from it is to install
a printer driver that generates .ps, and make it "prnt to file".  One 
can select .eps under the postscript options,
but I have had unreliable results with theiir boundingbox. I fix this 
via GSView and the "ps to eps" conversion

I guess that the magic recipe is to find a printer driver, and settings 
in powerpoint  that produces the
text to be printed within the () parentheses that psfrag needs.

I have also had failures with some printer drivers, in that while they 
produce .ps that Ghostscript reads and displays well,
when I run the latex and I guess dvips, then postscript errors are reported.
The simple apple Laserwriter 2 seemed to work, but I still can't get the 
PSFRAG to work in it.

As a result of googling around, I also found  Ipe  www.ipe.compgeom.org  
and it seems to work well.
It is free, and the result of an academic's work, and is worth examining.
If I insert a text box with a letter or a  sequence of letters, psfrag 
does do the replacement.
Strangely, using TAG as the text didn't work. Maybe it gets mangled in 
the postscript.
Simple tags like    y    also worked.

I may use Ipe a lot more in future, but Powerpoint is so interchangeable !
I would still like to resolve the powerpoint (and openoffice draw) to 
\psfrag route, so if anyone has a solution,
please let me know. Please advise exact settings in Powerpoint, way used 
to get .ps or .eps, and anything special needed to get psfrag to work

Also, I did a string search in an .eps from Ipe and can't find the tag 
(ta1) that psfrag successfully replaces, but it is not there!

Cheers
Garth Milne





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