LaTeX series -- Figure

Konbawa!!!!.....

Well... LaTeX lesson is back!!!..

Today.... I got stuck on chart... well.... it is not really stuck.... I could convert text as figure if I MS word. However, I'm currently using LibreOffice that does not support this particular functionality. All I could do is to convert the chart to pdf file and convert to .eps file...

Well... it works but I was reluctant to admit that the quality of .eps file is quite low..  So, I spent "quite some time" (3 hours or so) to figure out on how to generate quality .eps file... Again... I was loath to install any software such as Inkscape which really capable of handling .eps file (generating/converting to .eps)...

To cut the story short.... I GIVE UP on trying to find the solution.... urmmm... the quality of pdf file is better in my opinion.... So.... What I did was:-

(a) Paste the chart generated in LibreOffice Writer into LibreOffice Draw
(b) Export as pdf
(c) Download pdf-cropper. Crop the white space.
(d) Replace \usepackage[dvips]{graphicx} with \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} *refer to LaTeX entry
(e) Add a new package \usepackage{epstopdf}
(f) Replace setting in Quick Build from "LaTeX + DviPs + Ps2Pdf + Pdf Viewer" to "PdfLaTeX + Pdf Viewer"

Now... everything is in order.... instead using .eps file for the figure... I will use .pdf file which could easily generated and much better in quality. I will stick with this setting for a while until I find a way to use .eps file effectively..... 

Until then..... Good luck for me!! :)


Update: Dec 8, 2011


Sometimes it's annoying to set up the figure placement if you want to use figure that span for two column {figure*} instead of {figure}. Well, there are solutions for this particular problem. You can use \usepackage{dblfloatfix} which actually a combination of package stfloats and fixltx2e. Placement control such as [tbp] can be used "correctly", though it depends on your document as well. The more figure*, the messy will it be.. 

Update: Jan 19, 2012

When using subfigure package, certainly we want to cite the figure in the main text and for IEEE the citation/reference would be something like "Fig. 1(a)". Using default configuration \ref{figure} would not work and will display "Fig. 1a". On the other hand, \subref{figure} will only display "Fig. (a)". Nevertheless, there is a simple twewak that I found to be useful and worked perfectly. Just add the following command and BOOM!!!... \subref{figure} command will now present you with "Fig. 1(a)" perfectly!!


\captionsetup[subfloat]{listofformat=parens}

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