AFMPATH environmental variable

Yes, but I think LaTeX requires the bounding box information.

Here is how I use PS (not eps) directly in LaTeX. The first arg to
difig specifies the figure size.

\usepackage[dvips]{graphics}

\newcommand{\dofig}[2]
{\center{\scalebox{#1}{\includegraphics*{#2}}}}

\begin{figure}[t]
  \dofig{0.5}{somefile.ps}
  \caption{\footnotesize Insert your figure caption here}
  \label{fig:figref}
\end{figure}

    > I can think of the quick and dirty way of calling the ps2eps
    > script to do the conversion but it requires perl and
    > ghostscript. Since the postscript backend is already there in
    > matplotlib, it'd be nice to have the eps option directly.

Agreed.

JDH