Table of Contents
Scripting in Windows
This page will introduce some methods for scripting within Windows. It will focus on using the DOS-like cmd window using the example of converting a bunch of .eps files to .pdf. A good use for this is if you want to reformat Stata graphs.
Entering Windows Commands
To enter DOS commands in Windows, go to Start → Run and type “cmd” and press enter. You get a black box that says something like “C:\ ” in the upper left. Here, you can type shell commands for Windows. For a reference on some of the commands, see this.
I will assume that you already have “Ghostscript” installed. If not, you could get it from SourceForge, among other places.
First, make sure that you can run eps2pdf in the command window. Change to a directory where you have an eps file with
cd C:\directory\with\eps\
Then, type:
eps2pdf file.eps
This should create a file named “file.pdf” in the directory “C:\directory\with\eps\”
If that worked, you have two options to automate your task further. You can try to do a for loop as follows. Type the command:
FOR %EPSFILE IN C:\directory\with\eps\*.eps DO eps2pdf %EPSFILE
Writing a Script or ''Batch File''
This should create a .pdf version of every eps file in the directory. The other option is that you can create a batch file with line for each command that you want to enter. For example, if you know the 6 file names that you will want to convert to pdf (perhaps because you create them from a Stata .do file), you can write the same commands that you would run every time in a file. To do this, open Notepad or another text editor. Then, enter the following text
cd C:\directory\with\eps\ eps2pdf eps1.eps eps2pdf eps2.eps ... eps2pdf eps3.eps
Save this file as epsbatchfile.bat. Now, you can go back into the shell, navigate to the directory where you saved “epsbatchfile.bat” and enter the command
epsbatchfile.bat
This will run the commands above!
A final thing that might make this even better is to integrate this into your Stata code. By using the command winexec “C:\path\to\epsbatchfile.bat” within Stata, you can have Stata convert all of your .eps files to PDFs as it is running.