Printed Size and Location

L^ATEX treats the contents of a picture environment as a single box, aligned by default on the lower left corner. An ePiX file must tell L^ATEX how large the printed figure will be, and where to align this ``picture box''. The commands

  picture(2.5, 1.25);
  unitlength("1in");
  offset(0.25,-0.5);

set L^ATEX's unitlength to 1 in, create a picture environment 2.5 in wide and 1.25 in high, then shift the picture right by 0.25 in and down by 0.5 in. The picture and unitlength lines are mandatory in an ePiX preamble. The offset is optional and defaults to $(0,0)$.

The argument of a unitlength command is a numerical constant followed by one of the following valid L^ATEX length units: bp (big point), cm (centimeter), in (inch), mm (millimeter), pc (pica), pt (point, the default unit), and sp (scaled point). (There are 72 big points per inch, 12 points per pica, and 65536 scaled points per point.) ePiX does not directly support the use of different horizontal and vertical length units; you are expected to perform any conversions manually.

A non-zero offset causes the contents of a picture to appear in a location where L^ATEX does not expect them. This may be useful when an eepic file is included into a L^ATEX document, but requires visual tweaking. A non-zero offset is risky when compiling a figure into EPS or PDF with elaps, since dvips may crop the figure according to rules of its own.