General ⇒ PDF to Latex on Mac

[jksp22]

I already have a book in pdf document that has graphs and texts (I believe made with coreldraw). I've read that there are ways to convert pdf to latex but not very effective. Even if it was a possibility, I'm not sure about how the graphs would turn out.

I'm literally copying and pasting the texts, and drawing graphs using tikz. Using tikz to graph economic theories is taking longer than I first imagined. I'm using latex to see if I can make the book in color, and add a bit of other theories from my past work to combine into one.

If you were in my shoes, how would you go about doing this job while saving time? Am I approaching this correctly, or am I not seeing a faster & more efficient way to accomplish this?

[Johannes_B]

Right, there is no effective way to convert pdf to LaTeX.
You can use tools like pdftotext and pdfimages to extract the text and the images. Depending on how complex the text is (maths?), you need to invest more time. Depending on how fluent and experiencedd you are with TikZ and its graph drawing capabilities, drawing the graphs might be the bottleneck.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Using tikz to graph economic theories is taking longer than I first imagined.

Yes, also I often notice that both the first draft but also the fine tuning of a drawing requires much time. The result is mostly worth the effort though. And once you got some templates for your drawings, varying them is not so hard. You can produce several similar images from one base image, such as in cases where just some annotations would be different. Also, styles just needed to be defined once.

It would be great if you would like to show us some of your images. Perhaps we can help improving them. How about this idea: you post several topics with one image each with code, possible questions you have, and we help both with questions and with additional design ideas.

Stefan

[jksp22]

Just a little pressed for time. I'm not quite sure if this is the best method for drawing (or if I should use a drawing program to see if that makes it faster). The following code took me an hour to do. I feel like I'm wasting too much time. The drawing is already there, in black and white PDF page.

I managed to use inkspace and x11 to take out the vector image and put it on latex successfully. However, because it was made with a different program, the font does not match with a few pages I have already put on latex.

Should I continue producing graphs like I've done ? (probably not but I had to ask)

Code: Select all

\noindent\hspace*{\fill}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.82]
\usetikzlibrary{calc} %all
%define linear parameters for supply and demand
\def\adk{\x-0.5,{-0.2+(5)/\x}}
\def\adc{\x-0.4,{0.15+(5)/(-8.2+\x)}}
%draw axes, and dotted equilibrium lines
\draw[->] (0,0) -- (6.2,0) node[right] {$Y$};
\draw[->] (0,0) -- (0,6.2) node[left] {$P$};
\draw[->] (8.2,0) -- (14.4,0) node[right] {$Y$};
\draw[->] (8.2,0) -- (8.2,6.2) node[left] {$P$};
\draw[thick, color=red, domain=1.2:4] plot(\adk) node[right] {AD\textsubscript{0}};
\draw[thick, color=red, domain=1.2:4, xshift=0.7cm, yshift=0.7cm] plot(\adk) node[right] {AD\textsubscript{1}};
\draw[thick, color=blue] (0,3) -- (6,3) node[right] {AS};
\draw (-0.5,3.5) node[anchor=north] {$\bar{P}$\textsubscript{0}*};
\draw (1.4,3.6) node[anchor=north] {E\textsubscript{0}};
\draw (2.5,3.6) node[anchor=north] {E\textsubscript{1}};
\draw[dashed] (1.1,3) -- (1.1,0) node[below] {Y\textsubscript{1}*};
\draw[dashed] (2.2,3) -- (2.2,0) node[below] {Y\textsubscript{2}*};
\draw[->, very thick] (3.2,1.3) -- (3.5,1.9);
\draw[thick, color=red, domain=9.5:12.5] plot(\adc) node[right] {AD\textsubscript{0}};
\draw[thick, color=red, domain=9.5:12.5, xshift=0.7cm, yshift=0.7cm] plot(\adc) node[right] {AD\textsubscript{1}};
\draw[thick, color=blue] (11,0) -- (11,6) node[right] {AS};
\draw[dashed] (11,1.75) -- (8.2,1.75) node[left] {P\textsubscript{0}*};
\draw[dashed] (11,2.9) -- (8.2,2.9) node[left] {P\textsubscript{1}*};
\draw (11.3,2.3) node[anchor=north] {E\textsubscript{0}};
\draw (11.3,3.4) node[anchor=north] {E\textsubscript{1}};
\draw (11,0.05) node[anchor=north] {Y* = $\bar{Y}$\textsubscript{f}};
\draw[->, very thick] (11.8,1.5) -- (12.1,2.1);
\end{tikzpicture}
\hspace{\fill}