[texhax] How do I generate a .jpg/.gif/.png from TeX ?

[Steve Schwartz]

Tom,

On Mon, 2007-12-24 at 12:01 -0500, Tom Schneider wrote:
> Don't make them JPEG, GIF, PNG.  Make them eps.  Then you can use
> standard LaTeX to read them in
> 
> \includegraphics*{myfile.eps}
> 
> Note that this is inefficient.  You make a page with TeX/LaTeX,
> convert to eps, read it in as a figure.  If you are demonstrating
> something about TeX it makes sense.  Otherwise, you could just do it
> directly. 

I think it depends on the situation. I often use latex to tidy up a
picture that is otherwise hard to edit, for example by using the overpic
package to re-label graphs or add annotations or include multiple
pictures. For myself, this can be done directly in the latex source, as
you imply.

But publishers usually want clean figures, file-named by number, and all
ready to be inserted. The easiest way to do this is then to put the
relevant latex in a separate file, latex it, crop it, and then you have
a simple graphic that the publisher will accept.

For those publishers that will take pdfs, this is very easy with
pdflatex:

pdflatex <image-manipulation.tex>
pdfcrop <image-manipulation.pdf>

then \includegraphics{image-manipulation-crop} will input the result.

Seasons greetings,
Steve

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