Do you have TeXShop installed? (Oops, Microsoft Windows users are lost here.) Do the following:

  • Open the PDF document with TeXShop and navigate to the page containing the figure in question.

  • In the TeXShop toolbar, select the little dashed rectangle on the right to switch to selection mode.

  • By clicking and dragging with the mouse, select a rectangle containing the graphics you’re interested in.

  • Drag the selected rectangle to the Desktop. A little green plus (“+”) will appear indicating that a PDF document containg the graphics will be created as soon as the mouse button is released.

You’re done: There’s a new file on the Desktop named “texshop_image.pdf”.

If you wish to convert the graphics file to Encapsulated PostScript, turn on a Terminal (or X11 Xterm) session and type the following command line (all on on line, please):

cd ~/Desktop && /usr/local/bin/gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=epswrite -sOutputFile=texshop_image.eps -c save pop -f texshop_image.pdf

It may take a little while until the new EPS document will appear on the Desktop in the Finder. Of course, the GhostScript package, part of TeXLive, must be installed on your Macintosh. Please contact me if it is not.

Note that you can always print the PDF graphics into a PostScript file to accomplish approximately the same task.