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.