So you’re writing your brilliant thesis in LaTeX, and very probably you are converting your figures and images to EPSfiles. That’s what I did, because nothing else would… you know… work.
Problem:
I deleted the originals. I figured “Meh, it’s just a format conversion I can convert it to anything later.” That was apparently wrong. I have all these figures, and for some reason this journal I submitting them to wants them in the most bizarre format (write your document in word, include all figures as separate files in CMYK format as TIFF files). That may not sound bizarre, but it’s very bizarre to me. I blame it being a bioengineering journal and I am used to computer science journals (who almost uniformly want LaTeX and pdf documents).
Anyway, I have been unable to convert these figures out of EPS to anything. I don’t know why. I guess if I had Photoshop I might be able to, but nothing I’ve tried can perform the task. ImageMagick pretends to, but I just get blank (but correctly sized???) images.
Moral: Keep your original files when you convert to eps. You’ll need them later. Regenerating them is a huge waste of time and in some instances may be impossible.
This may sound silly, but as an outsider, submitting your paper to a journal seems overly complicated, why are there so many document and image types, can’t everyone use LaTeX and jpegs or png?
Because if you put LaTeX in front of a biologist they would literally explode.
LaTeX, for better or worse (read: worse), *is* programming.
After all, it was created by Knuth (Well technically he created TeX but whatever).
so why have computer scientist chosen LaTeX over the presumably simpler alternatives?
Because none exist that actually work… very well at least.
LaTeX wants to be XML, but it was 40 years too early.
Trying to typeset math in word, or handle references or anything else fails miserably.
Plus it’s free… It’s pretty impressive… but it feels old… and cobbled together with bandaids and dreams.