Forcing latex to handle home-made .ps files in an intelligent way

Question

I write papers in latex and write figures as PostScript programs. (The latter is not as crazy as it sounds, but that's a topic for elsewhere.)

My question is about the most intelligent way to get LaTeX to incorporate my homemade .ps pictures. There are several options that are short of ideal:

1. Use latex then dvips then ps2pdf and include graphics by

   \documentclass{amsart}
   \usepackage{graphicx}
   \begin{document}
   \includegraphics{my_ps_file.ps}
   \end{document}  
   

   This works, but the ps2pdf step on a file with lots of figures is very time-consuming. (It has been on the order of a minute on a fast computer for some papers. Small .ps files can have a lot in them because PostScript is a complete programming language.)

2. Manually do ps2pdf on each .ps file

   ps2pdf -dEPSCrop -dNOSAFER my_ps_file.ps
   

   then use pdflatex

   \documentclass{amsart}
   \usepackage{graphicx}
   \begin{document}
   \includegraphics{my_ps_file.pdf}
   \end{document}  
   

   This works too, but there is the extra command-line step for every .ps file that has been modified since your last run of pdflatex.

3. Use pdflatex and graphics rules

   \documentclass{amsart}
   \usepackage{graphicx,epstopdf}
   \epstopdfsetup{suffix=}
   \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.ps}
   \DeclareGraphicsRule{.ps}{pdf}{.pdf}{`ps2pdf -dEPSCrop -dNOSAFER #1 \noexpand\OutputFile}
   \begin{document}
   \includegraphics{my_ps_file}
   \end{document}  
   

   The 5th line tells LaTeX that when it sees \includegraphics{my_ps_file}, it should look for a file my_ps_file.ps.

   The 6th line tells LaTeX how to handle my_ps_file.ps: In order of the arguments, when (1) it sees a .ps file, it should eventually expect to have a .pdf file to insert, (3) it should read bounding box information from the .pdf file, and (4) it should run a certain command on the .ps file to get the .pdf file.

   The package epstopdf is used here only so that I can use the 4th line \epstopdfsetup{suffix=}, which tells LaTeX to call the .pdf file my_ps_file.pdf rather than my_ps_file-ps-converted-to.pdf.

   This works, and it automatically runs ps2pdf on my_ps_file.ps file, but only if it needs to: if it sees that my_ps_file.pdf already exists, it uses my_ps_file.pdf. (To get this feature, we used \includegraphics{my_ps_file} instead of \includegraphics{my_ps_file.ps}).

   This possibility eliminates the slowness of possibility (1) and eliminates the extra command-line steps of possibility (2). But unfortunately, it adds a new command-line step for every modified .ps file: You have to manually remove my_ps_file.pdf every time you change my_ps_file.ps or else LaTeX will keep using the old my_ps_file.pdf rather than making a new one.

Now for the question: The option I want, but don't know how to implement, would work just like (3), except that if my_ps_file.pdf is present and is newer than my_ps_file.ps LaTeX uses it, and otherwise runs ps2pdf on my_ps_file.ps.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I would use the full power of epstopdf:

\documentclass{amsart}
\usepackage{graphicx,epstopdf}
\epstopdfsetup{update}
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.ps}
\epstopdfDeclareGraphicsRule{.ps}{pdf}{.pdf}{ps2pdf -dEPSCrop -dNOSAFER #1 \OutputFile}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics{my_ps_file}
\end{document}

This will run the conversion program only if the target file (.pdf) is older than the source file. Remember to call pdflatex with the --shell-escape command line option.

Answer 2

The current release of TeXlive does just this with .eps files:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics{tmp1}
\end{document}

I have a file tmp1.eps, but not tmp1.pdf, so the first run of pdflatex says

Package epstopdf Info: Source file: <tmp1.eps>
(epstopdf)                    date: 2012-04-25 19:09:03
(epstopdf)                    size: 204851 bytes
(epstopdf)             Output file: <tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>
(epstopdf)             Command: <repstopdf --outfile=tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf 
tmp1.eps>
(epstopdf)             \includegraphics on input line 4.
runsystem(repstopdf --outfile=tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf tmp1.eps)...executed sa
fely (allowed).

Package epstopdf Info: Result file: <tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>
(epstopdf)                    date: 2012-05-11 13:09:38
(epstopdf)                    size: 64649 bytes.

<tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf, id=1, 614.295pt x 794.97pt>
File: tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf Graphic file (type pdf)

<use tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>

The second run just uses this file:

[2 <./tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>] (./tmp.aux) )

Now I change the postscript file: touch tmp1.eps, and pdf is regenerated:

Package epstopdf Info: Source file: <tmp1.eps>
(epstopdf)                    date: 2012-05-11 13:17:04
(epstopdf)                    size: 204852 bytes
(epstopdf)             Output file: <tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>
(epstopdf)                    date: 2012-05-11 13:16:39
(epstopdf)                    size: 64651 bytes
(epstopdf)             Command: <repstopdf --outfile=tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf 
tmp1.eps>
(epstopdf)             \includegraphics on input line 4.
runsystem(repstopdf --outfile=tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf tmp1.eps)...executed sa
fely (allowed).

Package epstopdf Info: Result file: <tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>
(epstopdf)                    date: 2012-05-11 13:17:08
(epstopdf)                    size: 64651 bytes.

<tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf, id=1, 614.295pt x 794.97pt>
File: tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf Graphic file (type pdf)

<use tmp1-eps-converted-to.pdf>

So save your PostScript files as .eps and check the system is intelligent enough to understand what you want.

Of course as the last resort you can use make: it knows how to check whether to regenerate dependencies.

Answer 3

I think the answer by egreg is the most pragmatic. For completeness I'd like to point out that for this kind of problem the Make tool was invented. A Makefile contains rules that invoke a tool when a source is more recent than the file that the tool derives from the source.

doc.pdf: psfile1.pdf psfile2.pdf psfile3.pdf
    pdflatex doc.tex

%.pdf: %.ps
    ps2pdf -dEPSCrop -dNOSAFER $<

The above code is just a sketch. It derives a pdf file from a ps file and states that your main pdf file depends on a number of files that are derived from ps files (by the second rule).

Compiling LaTeX documents with Makefiles is a little tricky because there might be other dependencies that are sometimes difficult to capture with Make. Another problem is that pdflatex might need to run several times.