[Ipe-discuss] problems including pdf figures with ipe 6pre25

[Otfried Cheong]

Kostas Oikonomou wrote:
> My particular figure is a scatterplot with a lot of points, labels on 
> the axes, etc.  I don't think that's a very suitable figure for 
> pdftoipe.  I assume this problem will be addressed in the future,
> but for now, is there some other way to include scalable graphics of the 
> type I'm talking about?

No, Ipe currently has no way to incorporate external PDF data in its own 
output.  What exactly are you trying to achieve?

I currently have no plan to add this feature to Ipe.  The reason is that 
the feature would probably disappoint many people, because:

* Ipe doesn't know PDF.  So Ipe cannot display the contents of the 
included scalable figure on the screen - you would only see an empty 
rectangle where the figure will go.

* Ipe wouldn't know how to generate Postscript output for the included 
figure.  So saving in EPS format wouldn't work - once you have included 
a scalable graphics in PDF format, you would no longer be able to save 
in Postscript.  (Or Ipe would need to use an external program like 
"pdftops" to do the conversion to EPS format).

Other than this, adding the feature would be realistic (but not trivial 
- unlike EPS inclusion, which is simply copying of text, PDF inclusion 
needs some parsing of the PDF document to extract the PDF objects that 
need to be copied).

Otfried