8.6.1 A note on Encapsulated PostScript

Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is essentially PostScript that doesn't leave any program that tries to include it into a different state after inclusion than it was before. This implies that EPS files ought to span at most a single page. EPS also announces its supposed active area by means of a %BoundingBox statement, which allows other programs to reserve the correct amount of room for the figure, even if such programs may not be able to display the figure themselves.

Graphical programs like Mongo and SuperMongo tend to produce ``clean'' PostScript files that already conform to the Encapsulated PostScript format, with the exception of an added showpage at the end of the file (so they can be printed directly), which is happily ignored by L^ATEX and dvips.

One should be aware, however, that other programs do not always produce clean PostScript or produce files that claim to conform to the Encapsulated PostScript standard, but in fact don't (in particular some MicroSoft programs that are quite happy to ``redefine'' a standard). IDL tends to produce reasonably clean (if sometimes inefficient) PostScript, but has a different notion of what up and down should be. When trying to include EPS figures produced by IDL, one may have to rotate the image over $+$ or $-180\mbox{\ensuremath{{}^\circ}}$. This cannot be achieved with \plotone or \plottwo, but can with \plotfiddle. But several other L^ATEX packages suitable for inclusion of figures are supported by soprop, as well. In the following we will give examples of each.