Unfortunately, the standard vector file format for Microsoft applications is WMF (Windows Metafile), a proprietary and poorly documented standard, which means it is poorly supported by other operating systems, like Mac OS X and Linux. Vector graphics are different to bitmap graphics, and tend to be smaller, and scale to both small and large sizes without becoming “jaggy”. This makes things very difficult, and while I prefer to use Apple’s Keynote program, presenting at scientific meetings tends to require Powerpoint. PDF is a great format, fully supported on the Mac, but Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint do not support PDF properly. My semi-automated system for generating these using complex R scripts to fetch the latest data from PostgreSQL, perform analysis, and then generates PDF and Postscript files for inclusion into LaTeX documents. I generate all my research graphics, charts, tables etc. Freely available PDF software includes xpdf and ghostscript, and source code is fully available under a GNU GPL open source license. Searching for PDF software using Google is fraught with difficulty - one ends up with endless links to commercial sites, who charge lots of money, mislead users into paying for software that is similar to, or even uses free software. I explain how to do this using totally free software. It is often necessary to batch convert PDF documents and graphics into other formats.

Convert pdf to jpg mac terminal