Hi Eric,

Like Jonathan Foster, I've never had any real problems joining or editing
figures in Illustrator and then using the result in LaTeX. Unfortunately,
I don't recall ever seeing the error message you mention, so I don't have
an obvious solution.

One possible issue which occurs to me: in Illustrator, you can save
EPS files in several different versions (e.g., Illustrator CS3 vs CS2 vs
CS vs version 10 vs ...). I tend to save EPS files one or two versions
older than the current version, on the principle that, e.g., Illustrator
CS3 EPS files might have some specifications or options that programs
like dvips may not (yet) know how to handle.

Illustrator does include a lot of extra information in the header of
the EPS file (some of which preserves Illustrator-specific information
like layers and grouping), and the size of this tends to increase for
later versions. So you can get a smaller EPS file out of Illustrator by
specifying an early version -- though very early versions like v.3
only allow for simple figures; I think you need to specify at least
v.8 output in order to have mixed vector and bitmap/image artwork.

cheers,

Peter

At 3:03 PM -0500 1/24/08, Eric Jensen wrote:
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




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Peter Erwin Max-Planck-Insitute for Extraterrestrial
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