ps2pdf tip: How to Get Around the "broken" ps2pdf Arguments

I through hours with a ps2pdf problem. Thank God someone on the PostScript news group managed to help me out. Here's the story for posterity's sake.

I'm currently working on a LaTeX document with some photos in it. As I'm using the PowerDot class, which is incompatible with pdflatex, I need to convert all my images to EPS and use ps2pdf to get my final PDF document. On the first attempt, I used the command

ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

and it worked, except that my photos came out all muddy, a result of over compression. So, I added the option to turn off compression,

ps2pdf -dEncodeColorImages=false file.ps file.pdf

and end up with the wonderfully obtuse error message

Error: /undefinedfilename in (false)
Operand stack:

Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1122/1686(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:70/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: No such file or directory
MiKTeX GPL Ghostscript 8.54: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

Ick.

It turns out that ps2pdf on Windows is a batch file, and batch files do not accept = in an argument. I had no idea that this was the case, but so it is. The solution, which is annoyingly absent in the documentation, is to replace = with #. Thus, the command on windows should be,

ps2pdf -dEncodeColorImages#false file.ps file.pdf

Like that, it works. And, I get my beautiful uncompressed photos in my document.

Inkscape Tip: Use Inkscape on the Command-line

It turns out that Inkscape (an SVG editor) has a few useful command-line options for non-interactive use. However, these are only documented on the Inkscape website (Manpage of INKSCAPE), but not in the documentation accessible from the program.

The real gem in the command line options is are the export options. These are a command-line interface to load up an SVG file and export as another format in a non-interactive format. This allows for the inclusion of vector format conversions in scripts.

Since the well-known image conversion utility ImageMagick does not have vector-to-vector format conversions, this is a very useful tool.

Particularly, this is an issue when using Inkscape (or other tools that use SVG) to create images for LaTeX documents, where one of EPS, PDF or PNG is typically used.

To convert an SVG file to an EPS file use

inkscape -f file.svg -E file.eps

to a PDF,

inkscape -f file.svg -A file.pdf

and to a PNG,

inkscape -f file.svg -e file.png