Hi,

I have produced a .eps file in gnuplot. I want to insert this file to "Microsoft Word" for the paper I am preparing but I have two problems with it:

1. The quality reduces drastically
2. The symbols I have in my graph changes. Like, I have Angstrom in its symbolic type in .eps file in linux but when I insert it in word it changes to J?!?!?!?!?!

Please let me know how to solve this problem

Hi -- I'm a physics prof. and I do a lot of scientific writing.
I don't use Word -- because it's just not very good for scientific writing. I use LaTeX. I know that is a snooty response, so let me answer
your question in a more practical way.

I have observed myself that Linux really likes the .eps format
and Windows in general does a bad job with it in all areas
(not just Word). I don't know
why, but if I have to work in Windows I always make a .jpeg instead.
Using GIMP (or any of several other tools) you can convert
your .eps into a .jpeg and THEN embed it in your paper.

It will probably fix both your problems.

It is an honor to receive your reply. I have to say that my major is physics too.

I am really interested to submit the paper in LATEX, but the thing is that the little time I have for the submission of my paper, leaves me no time to learn LATEX (

I have tried to convert the files, still their quality goes to the worse shape !!!!

What about trying to produce PDFs from Gnuplot?

I am sorry to hear this about the file quality, but I think the .jpeg should embed the proper symbols
(Angstroms, for example) does it?

It often matters whether you do cut and paste or
"insert picture". Usually "insert picture" gives higher quality. Also, if you cut and paste, there is
paste and "paste special". If you do not know about this, you should try the several options. One of them
is likely to be significantly better than the others.

ALSO -- the quality that appears on the screen and the print quality are not identical. Do you know this?
I always zoomed the screen way in to see what the actual figure would look like.

Good luck -- those are all the ideas I have. Good choice of major!!! Come study with us in New Mexico for
grad. school!

One more thing -- Convert the .eps to .jpeg in LINUX. The Windows converters generally do not work well.
This is my observation. I do not know why it is true.

Dear Prof.

I changed the terminal of gnuplot to jpeg and it seems that I am getting better results.

It would be an honor to study with you. Please pray for my paper acceptance.

Regards,
Sara

As you probably know, an eps file is a ps file with reduced command set and a bounding box. So programs that work with postscript should work for eps files as well.

Could you try the "pstoimg" program with the scale option. Then crop the result to what you need and rescale and export as needed in gimp (or use a better scale to begin with). Using different options could result in what you want right away, but testing it I must have got them wrong.

I did test it with "pstoimg -scale 5 -out rose.png rose.eps" and got a scaled picture without jaggies. It was framed badly (the entire page was scaled to a very large graphic, but cutting & pasting from my viewer "showfoto" to gimp would work fine. Loading it directly into gimp, cropping and exporting would work fine.
---

PS. The program will add a border at the bounding box. In gimp, first apply autocrop. Then crop out the border is you don't want it.
If you have a number of eps files in a directory, you can batch process them with:
pstoimg -scale <#> -out png *.eps

---
PPS. When I tried scaling in the gimp, it didn't look very good. Either adjust the scaling value of ps2img, or try the `convert' program with -antialias enabled. Also be careful with the compression settings you use when exporting the jpeg. (I don't know if word supports png. You could use `-o bmp' or `-o jpeg' instead if that is what word wants. You can also use inkscape to scale the eps file as well. It will even let you move components of the eps file around. This might be desirable, for example, to replace the labels or label fonts, or to arrange labels or touch up your tick marks in your graph.


snotty remark: How well does MS Word support metapost?

I had a very short excursion on "pstoimg" in google after reading your kind post. I didn't find a link to be able to get it. Please let me know a related link if it can be downloaded.

On my system (openSUSE) is is supplied by the "latex2html" package. It probably is used by latex2html to convert eps graphics to graphics on the fly. So it may be a standard package that your distro has as well.

Dear all,

I gave up!!!! Whatever I do the quality of the images are awful in MS Word. I decided to keep to my opensuse 11.0 and use latex.

Please let me know what I should install on opensuse to start latex writing?!

I searched the softwares but I didn't find the tex package.

Regards,

I'm not sure what the relevant packages are under SUSE, but look for tetex and install it. Also, you can find a LaTeX tutorial here.

You might also want to install Kile which is an IDE for LaTeX.

If you run "zypper se latex" you should see packages of LaTeX documentation. Search for "texlive" in yast2 for the programs. Don't be surprised if it is already installed, because another package needed it.