[texhax] help

[Peter Flynn]

On 19/11/2018 23:21, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
[...]
> It makes a lot of sense to convert bitmap graphics to PDF.  TeX Live 
> provides a program (Windows only) called sam2p, written by Péter 
> Szabó, which converts bitmaps to EPS or PDF.
> 
> This program is very fast, creates very small files, supports many
> bitmap formats, and is easy to use:
> 
>   sam2p foo.tif foo.pdf
> 
> For details see:  https://pts.50.hu/sam2p/

This is excellent, thank you. I was aware of it, but I assumed it was
Windows-only, so I had no occasion to use it. I have now installed the
Linux version.

> The PDF standard doesn't support either TIFF nor PNG.  pdftex, 
> luatex, and xetex are using the libpng library in order to 
> de-compress PNG files and convert them to PDF's native bitmap format.
> All this is done at runtime e.g., each time you compile your TeX
> document.

Indeed, but they are very fast at doing so, and it's transparent to the
user whether they use PNG or JPG.

> If you convert PNG files to PDF in advance, TeX includes them
> without further processing.  This is much faster and can save you a
> lot of time, especially if there are many such files.

Yes, if there are many files, preconversion is a good idea.

> It's a pity that almost nobody is aware of sam2p.

Yes it is. I wonder why.

Thanks for the information. I'll play around with it and update my
documentation.

///Peter