Department of Engineering

Some common graphics conversions

Introduction

There are 100s of graphics file formats around. See our Some Common Graphics File Formats page for a list of just a few.

You may need to convert a file that you have into a different format. For example

• Your word processor may only accept a few formats
• You may want to put the file on the WWW
• You may have to use a very old or specialised program which has very few output or input options
• Your printing facility may not be able to cope with many formats.

The first piece of advice is to try to avoid converting. Go back to the program you used to produce the graphics in the first place and see if there's a Save As ... or Export facility. Sometimes choosing Print to file gives the options you want.

Image conversion/manipulation programs

The next easiest solution is to find a dedicated conversion program that has dozens of input and output options. Examples include

• graphics converter (Macs, shareware)

Some programs designed for image manipulation also have extensive input and output options. Examples include

• Photoshop
• Gimp on Windows systems
• Gimp on the linux systems at CUED

Abode Distiller produces PDF files from various formats, including TIFF, GIF, and Postscript.

Many Postscript-related programs (especially free/shareware ones) are often based on ghostscript (gs) which as well as being able to read and display Postscript files can also convert them into dozens of other formats. Type gs -h on the teaching system for details of supported output formats (which gs calls "devices").

Command-line CUED programs

We have provided special conversion programs to deal with common conversion tasks or formats which only CUED use. Details of use are on the manual pages - e.g. typing man fig2dev tells you about the fig2dev program.

• fig2dev - Converts xfig files to Postscript, LATEX etc. This is usually called indirectly from the Export menu of xfig
• pstoedit - Converts postscript files to xfig files.
• ps2gif - Converts Postscript files to GIF (useful for the WWW)
• gif2ps - Converts GIF files to Postscript (useful for LaTeX word processing)
• jpeg2ps - Convert JPEG files to encapsulated postscript (useful for use with LaTeX word processing)
• netpbm - This suite includes image manipulation routines, and is scriptable (i.e. you can convert and manipulate many images using 3 or 4 lines of code). Type "man netpbm" for details. You may need to read about shell scripts to take full advantage of the programs.