Illustrator, EPS and LaTeX

Ironically, Adobe Illustrator creates malformed files when you save your illustrations as EPS, and of course LaTeX, ghostscript and thus pdflatex choke on them. There’s however a simple remedy: the eps2eps “distiller” strips all non-essential parts away from EPS files thus fixing also malformed AI EPS files.

For reference, here’s the gist of my (unoptimized) eps2pdf script I use before I run pdflatex:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir temp-eps-eps
for file in *.eps; do
    echo -e "$file";
    eps2eps $file temp-eps-eps/$file;
    cd temp-eps-eps;
    epstopdf $file --outfile=`echo -e $file | sed -e "s/\.eps/\.pdf/g"`;
    mv `echo -e $file | sed -e "s/\.eps/\.pdf/g"` ..;
    rm $file;
    cd ..;
done
rmdir temp-eps-eps

This should be called in the directory whose EPS files you wish to convert to PDF.

And why do I use EPS? Pretty much any vector graphics application supports it. Pretty often, saving your illustrations directly as well-behaving PDFs can be much more difficult than using EPS.