For some tasks, it is easiest to revert to Microsoft software. I have found MS Powerpoint to be the easiest way to create nice looking diagrams and figures. The trouble is, if you are writing in Latex, you need some way to convert those figures to EPS format. The way I used to do this was to save my figures in Powerpoint as an uncompressed image type (say BMP), and then use the GIMP to convert to EPS. The problem is, this results in grubby images. I tried using ImageMagick instead, but the EPS it outputs cannot be interpreted by the Latex tools or eps2eps. So, what to do?
In producing her thesis, Karen figured out that the best way to generate EPS files from graphics generated on the Windows platform is to save your images as WMF (Windows Metafiles) and then use WMF2EPS to convert to EPS. WMF2EPS is a shareware Windows utility. The EPS files it produces are several orders of magnitude clearer and crisper than any other method I’ve tried. One method I didn’t try, which might produce similarly crisp images, is to print the image to a file and then use the ps2epsi Linux utility. Another option is to create PDF images and then use pdflatex instead of the regular Latex and DVI tools. I will continue to experiment with these alternatives in the future.
