Figures and Tables

Please use the standard L^ATEX figure and table environments, placing the captions below the item. Use a tabular environment for tables, not a manually formatted verbatim style.

One particular problem with figures is pixellation. Standard screen resolution (72 dpi) is adequate for photos or similar graphics involving gradations of colour or grey, however the results are poor for ``monochrome'' line drawings. Ideally, line drawings should be supplied in a vector graphics format, although bitmaps at 300dpi of higher is an acceptable alternative if vector graphics prove impossible.

The main industry standard vector graphics format is encapsulated postscript -- most drawing or plotting packages will allow export of encapsulated postscript (eps format). If that is not available, there is a fairly simple trick to creating epsf files. Start by printing the page to a file using a generic postscript driver. Then you will find that the postscript file itself is just a standard ASCII text file, and can be edited by your favourite editor. You will probably find the contents incomprehensible though, unless you've studied the postscript language.

Nevertheless, there are only two lines that need to be changed to convert a standard postscript file into an EPSF one, both of them comments. The first line is the one beginning with %!PS-... The part after %PS is versioning information, that is not particularly important. Add the word EPSF to the end of the line -- eg.

%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF

The second line that needs editing is a line beginning with %%BoundingBox:. After this leadin are four numbers specifying the min x, min y, max x and max y of the image in question, in units of printer points (1/72 inch). This line may or may not already exist -- if it does, the values probably refer to the whole of a printed page. You can use the gv or GSView utility to assist in working out what the bounding box values should be.

An alternative to supplying eps versions of the figures, is to supply it as a Windows graphic (WMF) embedded within a Word or RTF document. We can extract these as eps.

Within L^ATEX, epsf images can be included using the command \epsfbox, or \includegraphics. If you need to clip the image to the specified bounding box, specify \epsfclipon before the \epsfbox command, or use the \includegraphics* command.