EPS conversion

Anyone using LaTeX will sooner or later want to embed images in his paper. LaTeX only accepts EPS files - no standard support for jpg or png images. In order to use such images, you must first convert them to EPS. I'm using ImageMagick's 'convert' utility for this.

The problem was I was converting a 20kb png file and got a eps file over 1 megabyte in size! Reducing resolution and quality didn't help. Today I found the source of the problem - it appears that the eps format has 3 versions, and the default version is 1 - a very old format that pretty much saves everything as uncompressed ASCII. Once I told 'convert' to use EPS 3, the result was a 20kb eps file :)

Usage is simply:

convert fig.png eps3:fig.eps