585. Very briefly: use latex to combine .eps files into a single .eps

Say you have a figure made up by several smaller images by combining several includegraphics statements. Say also that you need to submit the figure as a single file when uploading the final version of your article.

The first step is to make sure that the output .ps file fits flush to the figure (see http://texblog.org/tag/fit-page-to-content/) using the standalone class:
 

\documentclass[varwidth=true, border=10pt, convert={size=640x}]{standalone}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}[h]
 \begin{center}
 \includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{figure_1a.eps}
 \includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{figure_1b.eps}
 \includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{figure_1c.eps} \\
 \includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{figure_1d.eps}
 \includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{figure_1e.eps}
 \end{center}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

Then use ps2eps to turn the ps into an eps file:

ps2eps combined_image.ps