Including Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint Figures Into a Latex File

Martin Rinard
Laboratory for Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
rinard@lcs.mit.edu

Introduction

LaTex works fine for most of my paper writing needs, but including drawing is always a potential problem. I've figured out how to include drawings from Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator into LaTex documents. This note tells you how to do it; hopefully it will spare you the hassle of figuring it out from scratch like I did. Fair warning -- I have tried this procedure out for several examples, but there is no guarantee it will work for other examples or for other versions of PowerPoint or Illustrator. Good luck!

Including Adobe Illustrator Drawings

This procedure is designed to work with Adobe Illustrator version 7.0 installed on Windows NT 4.0.

1.: Draw your figure using Adobe Illustrator.
2.: Choose Save As from the File menu. You will get a dialog box.
3.: Choose Illustrator EPS from the pull-down menu on the dialog box in the Save As Type field. Then hit the Save button.
4.: Another dialog box will pop up. Check compatability 6.0, uncheck the Include Document Thumbnails, and set Preview to None. Then hit the OK button.
5.: The EPS file should be ready to include! See Section 4, which presents the LaTex source to include an EPS file.

Including Microsoft PowerPoint Drawings

This procedure is designed to work with Microsoft PowerPoint 97 running on Windows NT 4.0.

1.: Draw your figure using PowerPoint. PowerPoint apparently generates stuff outside the bounding box; I've been able to get around this by moving the figure to the upper left hand corner of the page before printing it.
2.: Choose Print from the File menu.
3.: A dialog box pops up; check Print to File and Print Current Page, then hit
4.: From PowerPoint, print the page containing the figure to a file. You do this by choosing Print from the File menu, then checking Print to file and Current slide on the dialog box that comes up. Hit OK, and you'll get a dialog box that asks you to choose where to put the PostScript file.
5.: Read the generated PostScript file into GhostView, and choose PS to EPS from the File menu. Generate an EPS file.
6.: Delete everything between the %%BeginSetup and %%EndSetup. I have written a quick Perl program that does this. It reads from standard input and prints to standard output. Figure 1 presents the program.
7.: The EPS file should be ready to include! See Section 4, which presents the LaTex source to include an EPS file.

**Figure 1:** Perl Program to Delete Problematic Stuff in PowerPoint PostScript Files
$\begin{figure} \begin{verbatim} ...$

Alternative:

1.: From PowerPoint, print the page containing the figure to a file.
2.: Read the generated PostScript file into Adobe Illustrator.
3.: Edit the file as desired. Note that PowerPoint puts lots of invisible junk around the figure, so you should probably delete the junk.
4.: Follow the procedure for inserting an Adobe Illustrator figure into a LaTex document.

People tell me that with some printer drivers, it is possible to print EPS directly from PowerPoint, then include the EPS file directly into a LaTex document.

Including A Figure

Here is the LaTex source to include a figure:

\begin{figure}[htbp]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c}
\psfig{figure=figuretest.eps,clip=}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Here Is a PowerPoint Figure Inserted Into A Latex File}
\end{figure}

Figure 2 presents the figure.

**Figure 2:** Here Is a PowerPoint Figure Inserted Into A Latex File
$\begin{figure} \begin{center} \begin{tabular} {c} \psfig {figure=figuretest.eps} \end{tabular}\end{center}\end{figure}$

A typical situation is that you are running Illustrator or PowerPoint on a Windows machine, and LaTex on a Unix machine. If this is the case, you will have to use ftp or some similar program to transfer the EPS file from the Windows machine to the Unix machine before you can include it.

Acknowledgements

In graduate school I shared an apartment for several years with Tom Rokicki. Besides being a great roommate, Tom is also a PostScript and Latex wizard, and I got some PostScript advice from him as was I figuring out how to do this.

About this document ...

Including Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint Figures Into a Latex File

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 97.1 (release) (July 13th, 1997)

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 -no_subdir -no_navigation figure.tex.

The translation was initiated by Martin Rinard on 12/18/1998

Martin Rinard
12/18/1998