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Ipe 6.0 creates (Encapsulated) Postscript or PDF files. These files can be used in any way that PDF or Postscript files are used, such as viewed with Ghostview, with Acrobat Reader or Xpdf, edited with Acrobat, or included in Latex/Pdflatex documents. However, Ipe cannot read arbitrary Postscript or PDF files, only files it has created itself. This is because files created by Ipe contain a special hidden stream that describes the Ipe objects. (So if you edit your Ipe-generated PDF file in a different program such as Adobe Acrobat, Ipe will not be able to read the file again afterwards.)
You decide in what format to store a figure when saving it for the first time. Ipe gives you the option of saving with extensions "eps" (Encapsulated Postscript), "ps" (Postscript), "pdf" (PDF), and "xml" (XML). Note that only documents of a single page can be stored in Encapsulated Postscript format, as this format doesn't support multi-page documents. Files saved with extension "xml" are--obviously--XML files and contain no Postscript of PDF information. The precise XML format used by Ipe is documented later in this manual. XML files can be read by any XML-aware parser, and it is easy for other programs to generate XML output to be read by Ipe. You probably don't want to keep your figures in XML format, but it is excellent for communicating with other programs, and for converting figures between programs.
There are perhaps two major uses for Ipe documents. The first is for inclusion into Latex documents, the second is for making presentations. There isn't much to be said about the second use: You create a PDF file with Ipe, and either print it on transparencies or present it using a laptop with Acrobat Reader. You should read the section on page presentations if you plan to make on-line presentations, as Ipe now allows you to create pages that are displayed incrementally in Acrobat Reader.
So let's concentrate on the first and original use of Ipe documents, inclusion in Latex documents. Most Latex installations support the inclusion of figures in Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) format (the "Encapsulated" means that there is only a single Postscript page and that it contains a bounding box of the figure).
The standard way of including EPS figures is using the graphicx
package. If you are not familiar with it, here is a quick overview.
In the preamble of your document, add the declaration:
\usepackage{graphicx}One useful attribute to this declaration is
draft
, which stops
LaTeX from actually including the figures--instead, a rectangle
with the figure filename is shown:
\usepackage[draft]{graphicx}
To include the figure "figure1.eps", you use the command:
\includegraphics{figure1}Note that it is common not to specify the file extension ".eps". The command
\includegraphics
has various options to
scale and rotate the figure. For instance, to scale the same figure
to 50%, use:
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{figure1}To scale such that the width of the figure becomes 5 cm:
\includegraphics[width=5cm]{figure1}Instead, one can specify the required height with
height
.
Here is an example that scales a figure to 200% and rotates it by
45 degrees counter-clockwise. Note that the scale argument should be
given before the angle
argument.
\includegraphics[scale=2,angle=45]{figure1}
Let's stress once again that these commands are the standard commands
for including EPS files in a LaTeX document. Unlike in previous
versions of Ipe, Ipe files neither require nor support any special
treatment.1 If you are used to other commands
for EPS inclusion, such as the old-fashioned epsfig
package,2
you can use them as well for Ipe figures. If you want to know more
about the LaTeX packages for including graphics and producing
colour, check the grfguide.tex
document that is probably
somewhere in you TeX installation.
If you are a user of Pdflatex (a version of Latex that produces PDF instead of DVI output), you cannot include EPS files. Instead, save your Ipe figures in PDF format, and include them in the way described above.
Unfortunately, versions of Pdflatex earlier than 1.10 have a problem including PDF figures. Each page of a PDF document can carry several "bounding boxes", such as the MediaBox (which indicates the paper size), the CropBox (which indicates how the paper will by cut), or the ArtBox (which indicates the extent of the actual contents of the page). Ipe automatically saves, for each page, the paper size in the MediaBox, and a bounding box for the drawing in the ArtBox. Versions of Pdflatex earlier than 1.10, however, look at the CropBox, or, if the CropBox is not set, the MediaBox. To include PDF figures using an earlier Pdflatex-version, you therefore have to instruct Ipe to include a CropBox by ticking the Use CropBox checkbox in the Document properties (in the Edit menu). (This is currently the default for new documents. The only disadvantage is that Acrobat Reader will not display full pages in documents saved with this option, so when making PDF presentations you probably want to untick this option.)
If you have Pdflatex 1.10 or higher, you can also solve the problem by including this line in the preamble:
\expandafter\ifx\csname pdfoptionalwaysusepdfpagebox\endcsname\relax\else \pdfoptionalwaysusepdfpagebox5 \fi(Note that this will simply be ignored if you are using normal LaTeX or an older version of Pdflatex.)
You can save all your figures in both EPS and PDF format, so that you
can run both Latex and Pdflatex on your document--when including
figures, Latex will look for the EPS variant, while Pdflatex will look
for the PDF variant. (Here it comes in handy that you didn't specify
the file extension in the \includegraphics
command.)
You may find it cumbersome to save an Ipe figure in both formats each time you modify it. If so, you can always save in, say, EPS format, and automate the conversion to PDF by writing a shell script or batch file that calls Ipe to do the conversion. For example, the command line syntax
ipe -topdf figure1.eps figure1.pdfconverts
figure1.eps
to PDF format. When Ipe is called with
one of the arguments
it does a single file conversion without starting the user interface.
There is a similar command line option -topng
that converts a
page of the document to a bitmap in PNG format. (Of course the result
contains no Ipe markup, so make sure you keep your original.) For
instance, calling Ipe as follows
ipe -topng 3 150.0 presentation.pdf pres3.pngconverts page 3 of the Ipe document
presentation.pdf
to a
bitmap, with resolution 150.0 pixels per inch.
On the other hand, if you only use Pdflatex, you might opt to
exploit a feature of Pdflatex: You can keep all the figures for a
document in a single, multi-page Ipe document, with one figure per
page. You can then include the figures one by one into your document
by using the page
argument of \includegraphics
.
For example, to include page 3 from the PDF file "figures.pdf" containing several figures, you could use
\includegraphics[page=3]{figures}
![]() | ![]() | ![]() | 2 About Ipe files |