getting ppt figures into LaTeX

[Russ P.]

Can someone tell me the best way to get Powerpoint figures into LaTeX?
I normally use eps figures (from xfig) in LaTeX, so that would be
preferable but is not absolutely necessary. I googled it, but
everything that comes up all seems to be either very old or plagued
with unresolved issues. Thanks.

--Russ P.

[James]

On Apr 10, 4:08 pm, "Russ P." <russ.paie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can someone tell me the best way to get Powerpoint figures into LaTeX?

Hi Russ,

I'm not sure what a Powerpoint "figure" is. My first thought is to
use the original image file that was imported into Powerpoint.
Alternatively, if you have access to a pdf printer driver then you
could print a slide to a pdf file and then use your favorite tool to
convert to eps. I'd probably just do a print screen, paste it into
GIMP and save to a format of my choice.

Good luck,
James

[Lee Rudolph]

I don't use Powerpoint, but I have it, and sometimes people send
me "presentations". Looking at one such, I can't tell whether
the figures are in any particular format, but I assume they aren't
--that Powerpoint allows users to include various sorts of figures.
So your question seems (absent further information that I don't
have) to be subsumed under the broader question, What is the best
way to get figures in various different graphics formats into LaTeX?
I think a standard answer (possibly "very old", but seemingly still
working well, in my experience) is to use the graphicx and grffile
packages together.

Alternatively, I see that (my, and presumably your) Powerpoint
allows one to "Save As" PDF; PDF figures work very nicely in
pdflatex (for the obvious reason), so nicely that I no longer
use eps.

Lee Rudolph

[Russ P.]

A powerpoint figure is a figure drawn in powerpoint. It has its own
drawing tool built right in. I don't know what the underlying format
is called, if anything.

Can I convert a single ppt figure to pdf or eps? People often talk
loosely of "converting to pdf", but I need a single figure converted,
not the whole file, and maybe not even a single slide. I don't think a
ppt slide with a figure on it is the same as a figure. I don't think
it is -- but then I know very little about ppt.

--Russ P.

[Lee Rudolph]

"Russ P." <russ.p...@gmail.com> writes:

>Can I convert a single ppt figure to pdf or eps? People often talk
>loosely of "converting to pdf", but I need a single figure converted,
>not the whole file, and maybe not even a single slide. I don't think a
>ppt slide with a figure on it is the same as a figure. I don't think
>it is -- but then I know very little about ppt.

If you can put the figure you want on a page by itself (using
Powerpoint editing commands), then you can "Save As" the whole
file to a (multipage) PDF, and follow that by using pdftk to
burst that file into individual pages (or just extract a
single page; whatever you like).

But that seems like too much work: opening the same Powerpoint
presentation I did before, I find that (using Windows, with its
dread 3-button mouse) right-clicking on the various "ppt figures"
invokes a context menu, in which (for me) the third option from
the bottom is "Save as picture..."; clicking on *that* prompts
me to save the relevant figure in its native format (some of
them are PNGs, some JPEGs, and so on) *or* in one of several
other formats, none of which are eps or pdf. So this reduces
your problem to one of converting from <some graphics format>
to eps or pdf. I strongly advise PDF (if the original format
is some bitmap): nothing is more horrible to contemplate, to
my mind, than a bitmap converted to Postscript.

Lee Rudolph

[Peter Flynn]

On 10/04/12 21:58, Russ P. wrote:
> On Apr 10, 1:26�pm, James <jjpuzz...@wowway.com> wrote:
>> On Apr 10, 4:08�pm, "Russ P." <russ.paie...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Can someone tell me the best way to get Powerpoint figures into LaTeX?
>>
>> Hi Russ,
>>
>> I'm not sure what a Powerpoint "figure" is. �My first thought is to
>> use the original image file that was imported into Powerpoint.
>> Alternatively, if you have access to a pdf printer driver then you
>> could print a slide to a pdf file and then use your favorite tool to
>> convert to eps. �I'd probably just do a print screen, paste it into
>> GIMP and save to a format of my choice.
>>
>> Good luck,
>> James
>
> A powerpoint figure is a figure drawn in powerpoint. It has its own
> drawing tool built right in. I don't know what the underlying format
> is called, if anything.

Should be a WMF diagram.

> Can I convert a single ppt figure to pdf or eps? People often talk
> loosely of "converting to pdf", but I need a single figure converted,
> not the whole file, and maybe not even a single slide. I don't think a
> ppt slide with a figure on it is the same as a figure. I don't think
> it is -- but then I know very little about ppt.

If you are using Office 2007/2010 that saves as .pptx instead of .ppt
then you should be able to extract the image from the saved file.

A .pptx file is a Zip file, so you can open it with any unzip program,
and there should be a subfolder containing the images. Extract the
one[s] you want, and open them as standalone images and save them in a
reusable format of your choice.

However...I haven't tried this. It's possible that Powerpoint doesn't
actually save charts (generated images), but recreates them afresh from
the data. Drawn figures I assume get saved. Maybe as EMF instead of WMF.

If you are using a version of Powerpoint that saves the obsolete .ppt
files, open them in a new version and re-save them as .pptx

Under Linux, WMF conversion is not usually included in free software,
but if you install Libre Office, and then install the PDF File printer
target, you can "print" a WMF file to PDF using the sdraw command.

///Peter

[Hendrik van Hees]

Of course, "powerpoint figures" are pixel graphics and not vector
graphics, which is bad in the first place. So it's usually better to
avoid to use them in (La)TeX documents.

In the case that I cannot get a vector graphics format of the figures, I
usually save them as png and put them into LaTeX directly, using
pdflatex to set the document. The same I do if I need a figure within a
pdf file, which I can't extract in a vector format: I just magnify it as
much as I can in okular, then cut it out, and save it as png.

It's always a good idea to set a tight bounding box. Usually this works
well with the auto-crop feature of gimp.


--
Hendrik van Hees
Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies
D-60438 Frankfurt am Main
http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/~hees/

[Peter Flynn]

On 11/04/12 07:32, Hendrik van Hees wrote:
> On 10/04/12 22:08, Russ P. wrote:
>> Can someone tell me the best way to get Powerpoint figures into LaTeX?
>> I normally use eps figures (from xfig) in LaTeX, so that would be
>> preferable but is not absolutely necessary. I googled it, but
>> everything that comes up all seems to be either very old or plagued
>> with unresolved issues. Thanks.
>
> Of course, "powerpoint figures" are pixel graphics and not vector
> graphics, which is bad in the first place. So it's usually better to
> avoid to use them in (La)TeX documents.

I think WMF is a vector format, so if the file is stored as WMF than it
should work OK when converted to PDF.

> In the case that I cannot get a vector graphics format of the figures, I
> usually save them as png and put them into LaTeX directly, using
> pdflatex to set the document. The same I do if I need a figure within a
> pdf file, which I can't extract in a vector format: I just magnify it as
> much as I can in okular, then cut it out, and save it as png.

Yes, sometimes it is inevitable.

> It's always a good idea to set a tight bounding box. Usually this works
> well with the auto-crop feature of gimp.

There is also pdfcrop, which works well if you can isolate the image in
a PDF and create it as a single page.

///Peter

[mount...@gmail.com]

I'm a bit late to this thread, but this might still help...

When I've had to deal with the same thing, I've used PPT to save the PPT file as an HTML page (using "File -> Save As"). That exports the .html file and all the figures separately as PNGs, JPGs or some such. Then you can just copy the images to some convenient location and away you go.

Hope that helps,

Sarah

[William F. Adams]

On Apr 10, 4:08 pm, "Russ P." <russ.paie...@gmail.com> wrote:

Best option is to purchase the full version of Adobe Acrobat which
adds a nifty button to make a .pdf to the toolbar (at least on
versions before the Ribbon interface --- if you're stuck w/ that use
the Adobe PDF printer driver). Either use the .pdf in pdflatex, or
then use a tool to convert the .pdf to .eps --- if you're printing
commercially you'll also need to remap colours from RGB to CMYK, esp.
black and tints of grey --- you may also need to tweak the line
weights.

Second option (free) install a good quality PostScript printer driver
--- this should have the option to print to a .eps file --- if it
doesn't, print to a .ps, distill to a .pdf, then convert to .eps

William

[pr_up...@yahoo.com]

pl install a ps printer driver and
(a) print each ppt figure slide as 'print to file' option from the printer driver with some_name.
(b) Convert the 'some_name.prn' file extension to 'some_name.ps'
(c) open the file with ghostscript.
(d) Convert the ps file eps file.

this file is ready to be included in your latex document. hope this helps.
(

[Scott Pakin]

Have you tried Lyx's Metafile to EPS Converter
(http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/MetafileToEPSConverter)? I've had some
success with that, both for complete slides (which you can print to
the Metafile to EPS "printer") and for content within slides (which
you can copy and paste into the Metafile to EPS GUI).

-- Scott