psfrag substitute when using pdflatex

Question

My standard way of including math in figures so far was to use psfrag and latex+dvips+ps2pdf.

I am now moving to pdflatex and tend to prepare my graphics in pdf format. I was wondering if there exists a way to include math in pdf graphics similar to psfrag. I am aware of auto-pst-pdf package but prefer not to use it since on large projects it runs much slower than pdflatex and I am not sure if it can handle microtype as well as pdflatex.

Answer 1

Objectives and constraints

• Extracting all EPS images imported in the main input file without modifying the main input file heavily.
• Converting each of imported EPS images to PDF one and save it with its original file name.

Assumption

• For the sake of best practice, I assume that you put all of your EPS images in a sub directory called Images. It means that the directory structure is defined as follows.

  other parents/project/Images/
  other parents/project/main.tex
  other parents/project/myextractor.sty
  

  You have to follow this convention as the remaining code uses this structure. Of course you can change this directory structure but you also need to modify the code a bit (not much). main.tex and myextractor.sty will be discussed shortly.

• You are using Windows. If you are non-Windows users, please disabled the cleaning code mentioned in myextractor.sty.

• You know that you must compile the main.tex with

  latex -shell-escape main
  dvips main
  
  ps2pdf -dAutoRotatePages#/None main.ps
  

Notes: For non-Windows users, replace # with =.

Step 1

Create a package called myextractor.sty as follows. Save it as mentioned in the directory structure above.

% myextractor.sty

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}[1994/06/01]
\ProvidesPackage{myextractor}[2013/10/09 v0.01 LaTeX package for my own purpose]

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{template.tex}
\documentclass[preview,border=0pt,graphics]{standalone}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\graphicspath{{Images/}}
% Active the following code (between \makeatletter and \makeatother) 
% if you want to cancel the effect of 
% width, height and/or scale defined in \includegraphics
%\makeatletter
%\define@key{Gin}{width}{}
%\define@key{Gin}{scale}{}
%\define@key{Gin}{height}{}
%\makeatother
\let\ea\expandafter
\begin{document}
%\edef\z{\noexpand\includegraphics[\varone]{\vartwo}}\z
\ea\includegraphics\ea[\varone]{\vartwo}
\end{document}
\end{filecontents*}

\RequirePackage{graphicx}
\RequirePackage{pgffor}

\let\temp\includegraphics

\renewcommand\includegraphics[2][]{%
    \temp[#1]{#2}%
    \immediate\write18{latex -jobname=#2 -output-directory=Images \unexpanded{"\def\varone{#1} \def\vartwo{#2} \input{template}"} && cd Images && dvips #2 && ps2pdf -dAutoRotatePages=/None #2.ps}%
    % disable the following if you are not Windows users.
    \foreach \ext in {dvi, ps, log, aux}{\immediate\write18{cd Images && cmd /c del #2.\ext}}%
}

\endinput

Read the comments given in the code carefully. They are as follows.

% Active the following code (between \makeatletter and \makeatother) 
% if you want to cancel the effect of 
% width, height and/or scale defined in \includegraphics
%\makeatletter
%\define@key{Gin}{width}{}
%\define@key{Gin}{scale}{}
%\define@key{Gin}{height}{}
%\makeatother

and

% disable the following if you are not Windows users.
\foreach \ext in {dvi, ps, log, aux}{\immediate\write18{cd Images && cmd /c del #2.\ext}}%

Step 2

Modify your main.tex as follows

% main.tex
\documentclass{book}
%\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{myextractor}% automatically load graphicx
\graphicspath{{Images/}}


\begin{document}
\chapter{A}
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=.5]{A}
\caption{A}
\label{fig:A}
\end{figure}
A \ldots

\chapter{B}
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=.75]{B}
\caption{B}
\label{fig:B}
\end{figure}
B \ldots

\chapter{B}
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=1]{C}
\caption{C}
\label{fig:C}
\end{figure}
C \ldots

\end{document}

The important notes are

%\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{myextractor}% automatically load graphicx
\graphicspath{{Images/}}

• Load myextractor package before graphicx to prevent graphicx overrides myextractor definition. As myextractor loads graphicx internally, you actually can disable graphicx in main.tex.
• \graphicspath must be specified as given above.

Step 3

Compile main.tex with latex-dvips-ps2pdf explained above. Afterwards, check Images folder, you will find a PDF version for each EPS image. Done!

Answer 2

I don't know if you intend to write LaTex on a huge amount of pictures, but I'm using Inkscape to do that. Basically when saving an image into .pdf format, there is a box to tick which allows for extracting all the texts and creates an ancillary tex file which places it automatically in the right place. In your .tex files, you replace \includegraphics{mypix.pdf} by \input{mypix.pdf_tex} (the file created by Inkscape).

Since it is just an open-and-save operation, I guess it may be possible to write some scripts to do it automatically on all files of a given folder