.jpg
files) for photographs and similar images,
PNG files for artificial bitmap images, and PDF for
vector drawings. Old versions of PDFTeX (prior to version 1.10a)
supported TIFF (.tif
files) format as an alternative
to PNG files; don’t rely on this facility, even if you
are running an old enough version of PDFTeX…
In addition to the ‘native’ formats, the standard PDFLaTeX
graphics package setup causes Hans Hagen’s supp-pdf
macros to be loaded: these macros are capable of translating the
output of MetaPost to PDF “on the fly”; thus MetaPost output
(.mps
files) may also be included in PDFLaTeX documents.
The commonest problem users encounter, when switching from TeX, is
that there is no straightforward way to include EPS files:
since PDFTeX is its own “driver”, and since it contains no means
of converting PostScript to PDF, there’s no direct way the job can
be done.
The simple solution is to convert the EPS to an appropriate
PDF file. The epstopdf program will do this: it’s
available either as a Windows executable or as a Perl
script to run on Unix and other similar systems. A LaTeX package,
epstopdf, can be used to generate the requisite PDF
files “on the fly”; this is convenient, but requires that you
suppress one of TeX’s security checks: don’t allow its use in files
from sources you don’t entirely trust.
A similar package, pst-pdf, permits other things than ‘mere’
graphics files in its argument. Pst-pdf operates (the
authors suggest) “like BibTeX” — you process your file using
PDFLaTeX, then use LaTeX, dvips and ps2pdf
in succession, to produce a secondary file to input to your next
PDFLaTeX run. (Scripts are provided to ease the production of the
secondary file.)
An alternative solution is to use purifyeps, a
Perl script which uses the good offices of
pstoedit and of MetaPost to convert your Encapsulated PostScript to
“Encapsulated PostScript that comes out of MetaPost”, and can therefore be
included directly. Sadly, purifyeps doesn’t work for all
.eps
files.
Good coverage of the problem is to be found in Herbert Voss’
PDF support page,
which is targeted at the use of pstricks in
PDFLaTeX, and also covers the pstricks-specific package
pdftricks.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=pdftexgraphics