Howto: Convert EPS from Grace to PDF (for pdfLaTeX perhaps?)

I am a big fan of the 2D plotting program Grace, as attested by some of my previous posts.

It lets you create high-quality graphs, which can be exported to a variety of formats. One conspicuous export format missing from the list is PDF.

Even if you use pdfLaTeX for example, this is only a minor issue - worth a grumble, but probably not a rant, since you know that Linux has a whole slew of methods you can throw at the problem.

Like ps2pdf.

Let's work through an example. Say you have an EPS image (fig.eps) that looks like so:

You say ps2pdf fig.eps and get fig.pdf. You open it up and it looks like, yikes!!!

The bounding box has been obliterated! And no, the -dEPSCrop flag does you no good!

You open up fig.eps in a text editor, and the first two lines you see ("at end") tell you all that is going on.

%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0
%%BoundingBox: (atend)

The specs of the actual bounding box are hidden at the way end of the EPS file.

%%BoundingBox: 29 51 716 529

There are two ways to fix this. If this is just a one off file, then you can replace the second line (with the "atend") with the actual line containing the definition of the bounding box. Save the figure (say as fig1.eps) and say:

ps2pdf -dEPSCrop fig1.eps

And all your troubles are gone.

Another method which does the same thing, but may be more useful if you have to do this to 100 files is as follows:

1. Use the ps2eps tool to "convert" the image to EPS (this automatically bring the BoundingBox to the top)

ps2eps fig.eps fig1.eps

Note: This may result in a huge fig1.eps, but if your intention is to get a PDF you can delete fig1.eps soon enough.

2. Use ps2pdf tool

ps2pdf -dEPSCrop fig1.eps

And you get a nice cropped PDF image.