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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

> Not sure about EPS - last I used it was for vector graphics within LaTeX documents. That was in the early 2000s.

People really should use pdflatex at the very least now. The original latex has too many issues and quirks.

I disagree, there are at least 2 reasons why eps can be better. a) you can exactly match the fonts in an eps figure to a latex file, which will look much better. b) you can use \psfrag to change text to get proper mathematics in figures, like gamma2 in an eps becomes $\gamma^2$ c) maybe also, the pstricks package is very nice, but does not work with pdflatex if pdflatex could do both, I would switch today but

Good points.

When I was in academia, I was among the first in our department that moved from latex to pdflatex. One of my motivations was that (E)PS files could be huge, particularly for bitmap graphics, whereas pdflatex supports PNG and JPEG as well as compression of PDF itself. That helped a lot when disk quotas at the time were very limited.

pdflatex doesn't really help here. pdflatex allows you to bypass dvi, the native TeX output format. The input for latex may well still include eps image files though.

True. Of course you can still use EPS, you just have to find another program to view them in. And isn’t there a tool in most TeX pakages that can convert it to PDF, then you should be able to use that at as an input if it makes it easier?

I used to use PDF because you could easily export them from Illustrator and suck them straight in to xelatex or pdflatex (but this was years ago, so I can’t remember all the specifics)

With pdflatex you can also directly use pdf files for things like figures, whilst standard latex requires postscript files.

At least it was the case when it mattered to me, now I mostly moved to LuaLaTeX anyway for other reasons.

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