I was really referring to the ease of making figures in the right format, as the poster made a particular point about including figures. When I used to use Mik

I was really referring to the ease of making figures in the right format, as the poster made a particular point about including figures. When I used to use MikTeX on Windows (8 years ago now) saving figures to .eps or .pdf from most applications was possible but a bit tricky. It often involved printing to file with the right postscript driver [1], then fiddling with bounding boxes and running through epstopdf. Most Unix graphics applications produce postscript and/or pdf pretty easily. I think osx with its Qwartz stuff will too. [1] e.g. Apple Color LW 12/660 PS with "optimized for portability" turned on.