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