I thought the following email would be useful to all.
Last night yet, I saved a graph as an .eps file using the pull-down
menus. I then inserted it into Word (OS X, Service Release 1
version). I had actually tried this before, but could never see the
graph in Word (it's clearly there but I can't see it in normal view or in
print preview). This time, however, I went ahead & printed it
anyway. What a gorgeous graph I got! Even when I print from Stata
directly, the background shading doesn't show up as well. Clearly, I can
be very happy with this .eps format but do you have any idea why I can't
see the inserted file in Word? I realize that this is in all likelihood a Word
Quite simply it's because Stata does not save file previews with its EPS
files. Most applications that accept EPS files do not try to render the
EPS file to the screen but simply show a bounding box in its place if no
file preview exists. It's up to the application that saved it to create
the file preview and embed it in the EPS file. Regardless of whether a
preview exists or not, EPS files are simply passed through to the
PostScript printer so they'll always print fine.
We'll add creating previews to our to-do list but it basically involves
writing a Windows/Macintosh/Unix bitmap to TIFF converter and saving a
TIFF preview in the EPS file... no easy task. Fortunately for Macintosh
users, TIFF/GIF/JPEG/PNG exporting capabilities are built into QuickTime
and every Mac with OS X has QuickTime so I'll take a quick look into it
and see how much work is involved.
-Chinh Nguyen
[email protected]
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