Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Shrinking those huge .eps files

This is a somewhat boring post, but it may help someone.
I have just wasted a lot of time submitting a paper to the arXiv and kept getting rejected because of the large size of the .eps files for the figures. The advice they gave for solving the problem did not help. The .pdf version of the figures was an order of magnitude smaller and so I found the best thing to do was just to convert the .pdf version to .eps. Since I only have Adobe Reader and am using Windows I downloaded this freeware converter. I realise if I was using Unix I could just use pdf2eps. Any better ideas?

1 comment:

  1. Doug Natelson sent me the following solution:

    By the way, in reference to your post from Oct. 7, I do have a way of making small eps files for the arxiv. It's terribly prosaic, but it works, at least on my windows box.
    1) Open the big eps file using gsview, and zoom to an appropriate scale.
    2) Ctl-C to copy the image to the clipboard.
    3) Open "Paint". Yes, Paint.
    4) Paste the image into Paint, and save as .jpg. If the original image is zoomed enough, the quality loss from jpeg compression is hardly noticeable.
    5) Run jpeg2ps from the command line. It's available here:
    http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/jpeg2ps.htm

    This has worked very well for me, though I wish I could automate the procedure, or create a drag-and-drop application without all of the hoop-jumping.

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