[Ipe-discuss] Save multiple .eps file for LaTeX animations

[Raphael Plasson]

Hello,

ipe is quite useful to include animations in LaTeX presentation files.
However, it seems that it is not possible to save multiple view ipe
files in eps format. It would be very useful to have the opportunity to
save such files into several eps files by a unique operation (e.g.
saving a file with 3 views in eps files giving the name "test" would
generate test-01.eps, test-02.eps and test-03.eps). As an example, I am
giving at the end of the email the bash script that I am using to
convert the ipe pdf into separates eps files.

Moreover, it would be interesting that all these files share all the
exact same cropping box, so that they can just be inserted in the LaTeX
file in a succession of slides. If the cropbox option of the document is
selected, the cropbox is set independently for each view, depending on
the present objects in the view, which results in different sizes for
each page. Unselecting the cropbox is not a solution, as the whole page
is then set as the cropbox. The only solution is to add a white
rectangle (rather than invisible, it is ignored by the cropbox if the
color is set as void rather than white) where one wants the cropbox to
be on a separate layer present on all views. What one would expect would
be simply to obtain, for all the views, the cropbox that corresponds to
a view that would show all the layers at the same time.

Thank you,

Raphaël

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#!/bin/bash
# requires pdf2ps (from ghostscript package) and pdftk (from pdftk
package :-)
pdftk $1 burst output ${1%.pdf}-%02d.pdf # Separate each page
for i in ${1%.pdf}-[0-9][0-9].pdf
do
        pdftk $i output $i.corr   # Correct bad xref (pdftk bug??)
        pdf2ps $i.corr ${i%.pdf}.eps  # Convert to eps
done
rm ${1%.pdf}-[0-9][0-9].pdf ${1%.pdf}-[0-9][0-9].pdf.corr  # remove temp
files