Monday, March 29, 2010

Linux: how to reduce eps file size?

I have couples of eps files which have a large size (>10 MB). Thus when using them in Latex, the output files (either pdf or ps) become very large and very slow to view. So it is necessary to reduce them first. Here provided is an approch working in Linux.

  1. Create a new open office drawing file, past your large eps file to the canvas.
  2. Add your canvas hence it has no too much extra-space (magine)
  3. Export your drawing file to a PDF file. Here you can use low compress factors etc.
  4. Use "pdftops -eps YourFile.pdf" to get your small-size eps file
Note: You can use open office drawing to export your file to an eps file directly, however, the eps file is even larger than your original one, so this exporting is not useful.

6 comments:

Anand. said...

It is an interesting post. In fact I often have problems with large .eps figure files which I would like to either upload online on some server or else send it for review purpose where the servers have a restriction of uploading file sizes which are less than 1 MB. So I follow a two-step simple way to reduce the file size of certain large .eps figures :

$epstopdf filename.eps

This creates filename.pdf

$pdftops -eps filename.pdf

This re-creates filename.eps with drastically reduced file size. If you would like to save the original filename.eps then you might want to copy filename.eps to another file.

$cp filename.eps filename_old.eps

And then repeat the procedure mentioned above. Hope you find it helpful.

Schizzo said...

epstopdf filename.eps
pdftops -eps filename.pdf
has transformed a 150K file in a 1M file.
It doesn't work very well in all cases :-/

Russell said...

Thank you so much Anand. Russell

Tsunil said...

@Anand, you are a life saver.

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Unknown said...

@Anand, thanks a lot for your comment. It saved me a lot of effort and time.
Vishwanath

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