Adjusting vertical alignment of subfigures in LaTeX

When using subfigures in Latex, I have sometimes found it annoying how the figures are vertically aligned at the bottom, rather than being centered. An example: The following code

\begin{figure}

\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=67mm]{PipeScannerUnderGround}}

\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=47mm]{CylScanGeometryPipe}}

\caption{}

\end{figure}

produces the following figure:

which seems a little lopsided. I found a nice solution at stackoverflow: Use the \raisebox command to adjust the vertical position of individual subfigures, for example

\begin{figure}

\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=67mm]{PipeScannerUnderGround}}

\subfigure{\raisebox{10mm}{\includegraphics[width=47mm]{CylScanGeometryPipe}}}

\caption{}

\end{figure}

which yields the following result:

Much nicer! :)

Adjusting LaTeX margins to fit a wide figure

I'm currently writing my PhD thesis, trying to shape a number of scientific articles into a coherent whole. In this process, I've come across a problem: The PhD thesis format has a text width of 120mm, which is suitable for one-column text, but I sometimes want my figures to be wider than this. How can I adjust the margins of a page on a per-figure basis? The answer: The changepage package.

Include the package by adding this line to the preamble

\usepackage[strict]{changepage}

... and use the \adjustwidth{leftmargin}{rightmargin} inside the figure environment, for example

\begin{figure}
    \begin{adjustwidth}{-10mm}{-10mm}
        \includegraphics{wide}
        \caption{Wide figure}
    \end{adjustwidth}
\end{figure}

In this example, both the left and right margins are reduced by 10 mm, making more room for the figure. The command also works with subfigures. 

Batch converting PDF to EPS

Today I found myself needing to convert about 20 vector images from PDF to EPS, because a journal that I want to submit an article to, demands that all graphics are in EPS format.

Searching the net, I found several solutions, many of them involving the pdf2ps or pdftops command-line utilities. The best solution was the one I found here, which converts all the images in a folder with a single-line for loop:

for f in *.pdf; do pdftops -eps $f; done

The code is run on the command line. I've only tried this in Linux, but some version of it may work in Windows or OSX as well.