How do I prevent LaTeX from drawing included graphics outside the bounding box?
LaTeX includes an EPS graphics “as is”, or to be more exact, LaTeX just reads the BoundingBox comment inside the EPS file and creates an empty rectangular box with the appropriate size. dvips in turn fills that box with the contents of the EPS file. It is not guaranteed that drawing occurs only inside the box.
If you wish to restrict drawing of the EPS graphics to inside the area enclosed by the LaTeX box, use the switch clip as an additional option to the \includegraphics command.
Example:
\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth,clip=true]{figure}
The filename suffix .eps can be left out, which comes in handy just in case you’d like to switch from LaTeX to PDFLaTeX and convert all your EPS graphics to PDF (see above).
The size of my included EPS graphics is not what I’ve expected. What’s wrong?
Frequently, just the BoundingBox comment LaTeX uses to determine the size of the graphics has the wrong numbers. Use the command bbox to correct that. Example:
replaces the BoundingBox line in figure.eps with a correct one. Of course, the filename given must correspond to a valid EPS file. For a list of options bbox knows about, just type the command without any arguments.