Most importantly, I need to develop figures for publications so the required format is EPS.
1. Which publisher is this? Normally they will accept PDF even if they say they require EPS. I recommend you insist. Sticking to EPS is counter-productive. PostScript has been dying for so many years.
2. There are tools to convert PDF to EPS. I recommend trying pdf2ps (which is included in the ghostscript package).
Cheers,
Ryo