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I'm looking for (free) tools for converting images stored in EMF (Enhanced Metafile Format) format to EPS (Encapsulated Postscript). What features make your recommendation stand out?

Edit: can you recommendation be used for batch processing?

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I use Inkscape for this, when I don't have Illustrator handy. It's more of a full blown open-source vector graphics editor rather than just a converter, but in addition to EMF and EPS it also supports SVG and PDF.

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Thanks for the answer. i'll have a look at Inkscape. – Uwe Honekamp Aug 13 '09 at 3:55
Inkscape is only usable if the EMF file does not contain any text. Otherwise you will get ugly results because of totally misplaced text elements. – Robert Aug 31 '11 at 15:25
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Use the MetafileToEps-Converter from the Lyx-Projekt:

http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/MetafileToEPSConverter

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Thanks for the hint, I will have a look at this tool. – Uwe Honekamp May 19 '10 at 18:34
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up vote 1 down vote

Open the EMF in PowerPoint, and print it as an EPS. This is handy for bringing a PPT diagram into LaTeX, for example.

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At least in Office 2010 you can not open EMF files directly - you can only import them as image into an existing presentation. – Robert Sep 20 '11 at 8:30
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up vote 0 down vote

Imagemagick under windows can do batch conversion. I would guess that converting to EPS would look like:

convert emf:<infile.emf> eps:<outfile.eps>

Have not tried it wit eps (have tried with png) and there might be a dependency on Ghostscript. The above code could be placed in a loop with the proper file name generation and so on. See the imagemagick conversion instructions for more details.

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This does not work correctly. Using the regular Imagemagick builds for Windows you are not getting a vector eps file. Instead you are getting an eps file containing an pixel image. – Robert Sep 20 '11 at 8:25
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In the version of Lyx I'm running (2.0.0 on Windows 7), the built-in converter screws up the translation. It shows up ok in the Lyx window but in the generated PDF, either the pdf reader sits there for a very long time time trying to make sense of the graphic its been given or in some cases no figure shows up at all.

The built-in EPS generator in Visio is not much use either because it doesn't crop the image but rather generates an entire page with the image in the corner. I couldn't see any obvious way of drawing a bounding box around the graphics and telling the convertor print only this.

In the end I ended up opening the emf in Paint and exporting a jpg which I imported into Lyx. That seems to come out ok. So far.

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