Category: unix

Recently I discovered that some academic publishers will let you submit PDF figures right up until acceptance, where they then need to be in an "editable" format. Vector figures inside PDF containers are editable of course, but the author guidelines for your journal of choice may well say otherwise, instead offering a list of ancient and bewildering image formats which are deemed acceptable. It's baffling to me why a journal would prefer a pptx PowerPoint file containing your figure than a modern open standard like SVG (not a format without consistency issues, admittedly). So for this reason I needed to convert a bunch of PDF figures to EPS (encapsulated postscript) without too much manual effort.

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