[lug] image to pdf?

[rm at fabula.de]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 01:07:33PM -0600, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> Not really.  GIMP is a raster tool and PS and PDF mostly wrap raster
> graphics inside page formatting, so the switch between PS and PDF wouldn't
> be that important to many developers (ie not worth the effort).  GIMP
> doesn't save text as text - it converts the text to raster information for
> all image formats except XCF.  The XCF format can save text information for
> all layers.  There are, however, no conversion tools between XCF and PDF
> (and most others, for that matter), so you still need to use GIMP to save as
> some standard raster format and then wrap it inside PS.


I'd second that. If you need the images to embed them into other documents
PDF is probably the wrong choice (for verctor graphics eps seems the most
apropriate, even so in a few years we might see svg taking over). Most of the
images i deal with i need for documentation created from xml or html that 
is delivered either as printouts or pdf (generated by pdflatex). The image
format best suited for this seems to be png (welcome to acronymia). My
LaTeX code looks like this:

\documentclass[10pt]{srcartcl}
\usepackage{fullpage, graphicx, url, hyperref}

\title{PenguinD - User Manual and Command Refernce}
\author{R. Mattes and T. Zerolo}

\begin{document}

\section{System Overview}

\includegraphics[scale=1]{/home/ralf/docu/graphics/overview.png}

....

Pdflatex is actually pretty happy about png graphics and you have quite
a lot of control over image compression/quality during format conversion
if you use GIM for that task.


  Ralf 
> For what it's worth:
> 
> The reason you can't save layer information from XCF into PS is that the
> layers can be combined in various ways and text layers can be modified after
> the text has been created in ways that can't be reproduced with the text
> layer information.  So there isn't any way to guarantee that the text layer
> information can be safely pulled from the XCF format and then reinserted
> properly when rendering using PS and/or PDF.
> 
> -- 
> Michael J. Hammel           |
> The Graphics Muse           |   I've found Jesus. He was behind the sofa the
> mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |   whole time.
> http://www.graphics-muse.com 
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