Hi,

I've always used xfig. You can install for OSX from fink. It complains
about an old app-defaults setup when I start it, but it works fine. The
beauty of xfig is that it will maintain your vector postscript files as
vector images, without rasterising them. This is what eps2eps likely does,
to make output files 3 times bigger.

I guess Illustrator also handles vector images properly, but the results
don't seem to work. I'd suggest trying xfig to combine them.

For the annotations, you can do this in xfig. Or there is this suggestion
from the idl newsgroup. You can use text "markers" in the postscript file
to anchor labels, and add them in latex later, with the psfrag command.
And example of how to do this with IDL/latex is attached below.

cheers
chris


---------------
IDL commands to generate a figure with b and t as text markers:

N=1000

x=findgen(N)/(N-1)*10-5

mu=0.
sigma=1.

y=total(exp(-(x-mu)^2/(2*sigma^2)),/cumulative)*(x[1]-x[0])

set_plot,'PS'
device,filename='fig1.eps',/encapsulated,xsize=12.,ysize=8.
!p.font=0

plot,x,y,yrange=[0.,3.],thick=4,/xstyle,xrange=[-5,5],xtitle='x',ytitle='y'
oplot,!X.crange,sqrt(2*!Pi)*sigma*[1,1],linestyle=2

xyouts,0.,1.,'t',/data
xyouts,-3,2.65,'b'
device,/close
set_plot,'X'


;END IDL

LaTeX file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{psfrag}
\pagestyle{empty}
\geometry{paperwidth=12.1cm,paperheight=8.1cm,margin=0pt}
\begin{document}
\psfrag{t}[l][][1.35]{$\displaystyle y=\int_{-\infty}^x
e^{-\left(\frac{t-\mu}{\sqrt{2}\sigma}\right)^2}\,\mathrm{d}t$}
\psfrag{x}[c][][1.75]{$x$}
\psfrag{y}[c][][1.75]{$y$}
\psfrag{b}[c][][1.35]{$\displaystyle y=\sqrt{2\pi}\sigma$}
\includegraphics[width=11.9cm,height=7.9cm]{fig1.eps}
\end{document}

---------------
Quoth Eric Jensen:

> Hi all,
>
> A colleague of mine is trying to composite several postscript figures
> into a single four-panel figure, and to add some basic annotation (a
> few arrows and a little text); the ultimate destination of the
> composite figure is in a Latex document. Since Adobe Illustrator can
> handle postscript, this seemed like it might be a good way to go.
> But this has proved unexpectedly problematic, as follows:
>
> - The output .eps file from Illustrator doesn't work correctly in
> Latex; running dvips on the .dvi file results in an error: "expected
> to see %%EndBinary at end of data"
>
> - The Latex/dvips error can be fixed by running the file through
> eps2eps, but the result is a file that is 3 times as big as
> Illustrator's output eps file, and significantly bigger than the sum
> of the input postscript files.
>
> The output eps file is saved with no embedded preview, so that's not
> the problem. The nature of the errors suggests to me that somehow
> Illustrator is saving some of the image data from the original
> postscript files (one of which is a bitmap) in some compressed format
> in its output postscript file, but I can't see how to tell it not to
> do that, nor why the output file is so big compared to the inputs.
>
> Any suggestions about a workaround here, or a better way to combine
> and annotate figures, would be welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eric
>
>