st: Re; Stata graphs exported to pdf in Adobe

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Erik said
I have, for a long time, relied on exporting graphs from Stata as .eps
files and then use "epstopdf" (from GhostScrip, I think) to convert the
resulting eps-files to pdf-files, and then including the pdf-files in
pdfLaTeX documents. Now this seems to fail. The pdf-files give a
109-error in Adobe products (PhotoShop 7, the latest Reader and Acrobat
5 on MacOsX). It looks ok in "preview" on macosx and prints ok from my
computer.

This is an examples of a problematic file:
<http://homepage.mac.com/sameos/research/vys.pdf>

Indeed, that file is problematic in Acrobat 5.0 (full version) in Mac 
OS X, while Preview is happy with it. What happens if you produce the 
.gph and then

graph export vys.pdf, replace

without the intermediate step of eps->pdf? That might be where the 
problem is being introduced (i.e. Stata is writing good .eps files, but 
Ghostscript is munging them). I do not use GS, so I cannot test that 
hypothesis.

However please note that you do not have to create PDF to easily 
include graphs in pdfLaTeX documents. The preferred method, for 
instance, for the Stata Journal style is to include as .eps with code 
like

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
\epsfig{file=fig3_1}
\end{center}
\caption{{\tt graph matrix} of regression variables.}
\label{fig3_1}
\end{figure}

This works fine with TeXShop for Mac OS X, and gives greater control 
over the placement of figures.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html

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