Re: Epstopdf and Lucida fonts in labels

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> I don't claim to really understand what you are doing, but would
> it perhaps be possible to call 'dvips -E' instead of manually
> calculating the needed cropping and using mogrify?

I've checked the dvips manual, and the `-E' option causes it to
produce EPSF, which I assume is what I've been calling EPS,
i.e., Encapsulated PostScript.  However, the whole point of
the exercise is to convert EPS, as output by MP, to
structured PostScript.  Somebody once used this term;  in
the course of working on this problem I saw the term "standard
PostScript" somewhere.  So I'm afraid using the `-E' option
won't work.  I'm a bit pressed for time, otherwise I would
double-check this.  However, having been through this in the
past, I'm fairly certain that it won't work.

Dvips seems to operate on the assumptions that one wants to
print a document on a printer, use a paper size corresponding
to actual paper, and that all of the pages of the document
should be printed on paper of the same size.  These seem
like reasonable assumptions, but do not apply in the present
case, causing me to jump through all sorts of hoops.  It may
be possible to write a configuration file for an imaginary
printer that will accept any paper size, but I don't know
whether it's worthwhile trying to do this, at least for me.
ImageMagick seems to be included in all of the GNU/Linux
distributions I use, and I don't think it was installed
specially.  I'm afraid I'm usually not much help to people
using Windows.

To summarize:
The problem is converting the EPS produced by MP to other
formats.  ImageMagick's `convert' can't convert it to PNG
and I'm fairly sure that `ps2pdf' can't convert it to PDF
(not double-checking these things, either).  The problem
seems to be, as Laurent S. has pointed out, the fonts.
Converting the EPS files to structured PostScript solves the
problem.  My method doesn't actually convert
them, it includes them in a TeX file of the same size as the
image. It's easy to put borders around the image either in
MetaPost, TeX, or by using `mogrify'.  Since dvips seems to
have problems with non-standard paper sizes, I just use a
standard one, put the image in the middle, and use `mogrify'
to cut off the edges.

I plan to write a little C program to automate the process
and I'll put it in the CVS archive on Savannah for GNU
3DLDF, if anyone wants it.  I need this myself, so I'll
probably do it within the next couple of days.

Of course, someone might have a better solution, or just
prefer a different one.

Laurence