Graphic file formatsx
Steve Litt
slitt at troubleshooters.com
Tue Dec 7 23:21:09 UTC 2021
Rich Shepard said on Tue, 7 Dec 2021 09:33:56 -0800 (PST)
>Most of the graphics I import into a LyX document are PDFs. When the
>data sets are large they load slowly.
>
>When I create a figure float I see that it's converted to a preferred
>format.
>
>Would these figures load more quickly if they were pre-converted? What
>is the preferred format?
As far as my diagrams created in Inkscape, I put them in the images
folder as .svg, and tell LyX to compile each to PDF. PDF completely
saves the vector information, so that you can resize without
significant jaggies.
Obviously, if the .svg is huge, the PDF will be huge, and conversion
will take a long time. As far as I know, LyX only performs the
conversion when:
1) There's no PDF, or
2) The .svg is newer than the current PDF.
So if I were in your position, I'd set LyX to SVG=>PDF, and let LyX do
its job.
Now if by "load slowly" you mean five minutes or more, there's an
alternative. You can set up a shellscript to use Inkscape or something
else to convert SVG=>PDF, and then use software to shrink the PDF. Web
search "how to shrink PDFs in Linux" for the various alternatives. The
last step for the shellscript is to place the newly converted and
processed PDF in the images directory. To do this, of course, you need
to set your LyX document to load the PDF, not the SVG.
The benefit of the shellscript is you can continue to work while the
software converts and shrinks your image.
HTH,
SteveT
Steve Litt
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
More information about the lyx-users
mailing list