Package pdftex.def error PDF mode expected

Question

Took me 6 hours today and still doesn't work, the error is :

Package pdftex.def error PDF mode expected mf-texlive/tex/latex/pdftex-def/pdftex.def

Example document:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\begin{document}

\includegraphics[scale=0.5,angle=90]{histogram_DSC_activity.eps}

\section{Title}
\end{document}

when I change it to

\usepackage{graphicx}

I get cannot determine size of graphic in the figure file. I check all remedy on google and here but ... also tried picture with pdf format.

Answer 1

PDFLaTeX does not support EPS files. However, some modern LaTeX distributions will try to automatically convert it to a PDF image, which maybe this doesn't work in your case. It would be also possible that the size information, namely the bounding box, in that EPS file is missing.

If you are using latex, i.e. the DVI mode of LaTeX, which supports EPS then you should remove the incorrect pdftex option from the graphicx package. The packages should be able to figure out the used driver by themselves, so you should avoid such options anyway. If you are using pdflatex then it would be better to convert the EPS to a PDF file manually, e.g. using the epstopdf tool (I'm not sure if it comes with the Windows version, but I think so). You need to change the .eps extension to .pdf then, of course. You can also drop the extension and LaTeX will look for files with the given base name with all supported extensions, i.e. \includegraphics{file} will use file.eps for latex and file.pdf (or file.png, file.jpg) for pdflatex.