How would you put a small graphic in your latex document source?

Question

I have a small graphic that is part of my document. It's PDF, is 193 lines, and has some binary data mixed with its postscript. I'm currently using the graphicx package and including the pdf as a separate file. Is there a way I can inline it directly in my latex source?

Answer 1

Take a look at Asymptote and Latex Integration Guide

Answer 2

I don't think there is a way to inline binary data in LaTeX. You could recreate graphics as vector type images with various packages (such as Asymptote recommended by lpthnc). If you're really clever you could write some TeX to store the data in array format and recreate it, but I don't think there's a package to do it simply.

Answer 3

you should also take a look at the pdfpages package. all kinds of options for including PDFs in your PDF document.

pdfpages: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/pdfpages/pdfpages.pdf

Answer 4

OK, I think this does what you want, but unless you really need to do something like this, other solutions are better.

To be able to use this solution, you need to:

• enable shell escape in your Latex command (-shell-escape command line option). Shell escape is disabled by default because of security reasons.
• have access to uuencode and uudecode programs where you're compiling the file.

Let's say your graphic is graphic.png, and your main document is doc.tex. First, encode graphic.png and append it to the end (the encoded data is all text):

$ cat graphic.png | uuencode graphic.jpg >>doc.tex

Then, make sure you have this before you include the graphic in doc.tex:

\immediate\write18{cat \jobname.tex | uudecode}

For example, here's a document I created:

\documentclass{article}
\immediate\write18{cat \jobname.tex | uudecode}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{graphic}
\end{document}
%%% Do not touch the data below, this is added by uuencode.
begin 644 graphic.png
..... (stripped a lot of lines) ...
`
end

Then, this will work:

$ pdflatex -shell-escape doc

As I said, there are much nicer and better solutions, and unless you really have to have one source file, don't do this.

Answer 5

Here's a solution I devised:

1. convert the pdf to postscript using pdftops (part of the xpdf package),
2. convert the postscript to ASCII-only, and
3. embed the postscript using the graphicx package and the \special macro.

A drawback is that embedding postscript using \special requires me to emit dvi instead of pdf. It would be nice to improve this solution to allow pdf to be emitted directly.

The latex source will look something like this.

\noindent\vbox to 112pt{\vfil\hbox to 248pt{\special{" gsave
currentfile /ASCIIHexDecode filter cvx exec
       25  21  50  53  2d  41  64  6f  62  65  2d  33  2e  30  20  45
       50  53  46  2d  33  2e  30  0a  25  20  50  72  6f  64  75  63
       65  64  20  62  79  20  78  70  64  66  2f  70  64  66  74  6f
       70  73  20  33  2e  30  32  0a  25  25  43  72  65  61  74  6f
...
       65  72  0a  65  6e  64  0a  25  25  44  6f  63  75  6d  65  6e
       74  53  75  70  70  6c  69  65  64  52  65  73  6f  75  72  63
       65  73  3a  0a  25  25  45  4f  46  0a
>
grestore
}
\hfil}}

I made a gist at github that provides a complete example.