The package was designed to accommodate all needs for inclusion of graphics in LaTeX documents, replacing many earlier packages used in LaTeX 2.09. The package aims to give a consistent interface to including the file types that are understood in your output, by use of ‘printer drivers’ (now known, simply, as ‘drivers’). The distribtion of the package contains several drivers, but others (for example, pdfTeX) are distributed separately. The package also offers several means of manipulating graphics in the course of inserting them into a document (for example, rotation and scaling).

For extended documentation see epslatex.

The package is part of the graphics bundle, which is one of the collections in the LaTeX ‘required’ set of packages.