Purpose

This package contains Encapsulated PostScript versions of the symbols used to label chemicals, according to EU directive 67/548/EEC Annex II.

It also contains a LaTeX file for printing 8 105x74 mm labels on an A4 page, plus a Makefile for automatically generating PostScript and PDF versions of the labels. Below is an example of the output of this file:

The author wrote these symbols because he wanted to print some labels for chemicals, and the GIF’s he found on the Internet did not scale very well to the required size (ca. 29x29mm).

The symbols were mostly handcoded in PostScript by the author, based on some GIF’s of the symbols one can easily find on the Internet. The symbols for E and O were automatically traced from GIF’s by AutoTrace 0.31.1 and then adapted somewhat by hand.

The symbols are:

Files

The following files should be included in the distribution:

chemlabels/
chemlabels/chemtemplate.tex
chemlabels/README
chemlabels/ChangeLog
chemlabels/Makefile
chemlabels/figures/
chemlabels/figures/corrosive.eps
chemlabels/figures/environ.eps
chemlabels/figures/explosive.eps
chemlabels/figures/flammab.eps
chemlabels/figures/harmfull.eps
chemlabels/figures/oxide.eps
chemlabels/figures/template.eps
chemlabels/figures/toxic.eps

The file template.eps is a figure with just an orange square on it. It was used as the template to create the other files.

Usage

These symbols are meant to be printed on a colour printer. A black and white printer cannot create a the required orange background. There are labels with preprinted orange fields available, but even then a b&w printer cannot produce the white fields on some of the symbols.

1. with the LaTeX template

   • make a copy of the file chemtemplate.eps, e.g. foo.tex

   • edit foo.tex, to fill in the correct name, symbol etc. See the comments in the file itself.

   • if you have GNU make: add foo.tex to the TEXF line; ‘TEXF=chemtemplate.tex foo.tex’ and run make

   • otherwise run:

     latex foo.tex
     dvips -o foo.ps foo.dvi
     ps2pdf foo.ps
     

     This should produce both PostScript and PDF versions.

2. just the symbols

   If your wordprocessor cannot handle Encapsulated PostScript, you will have to convert these files to e.g. JPEG files of a appropriate resolution. One program that can do that is ‘ghostscript’, a free PostScript interpreter.