tlug: tex/dvips to pdf: dekiru?

[John Seebach <jseebach@example.com>]

Hi, everyone.

I'm wondering: Does anyone have any idea how to go from tex to  a
.pdf document without the output looking like complete garbage? Is it
even possible?

I'm using dvips to create a postscript file, and then the ps2pdf
program from the ghostscript distribution. Looks fine when I view it
with gv, but when I copy the file to a windows machine (the one
attached to the Epson "sorry-we-don't-do-ghostscript-here" POS excuse
for a printer here in my office) and open it with Adobe Acrobat, it
looks terrible. 

Unfortunately, this appears to be no fault of Acrobat's, as the
screen display is a pretty good approximation of the printed output.
I've seen better print quality from dot-matrix. I'm assuming that
this is ghostscript changing my fonts into a bitmap. Although the
ps2pdf documentation says that this shouldn't be happening unless I'm
giving it a font that's not one of the 14 standard postscript fonts.
I don't think I'm doing this.

I'm using ghostscript 5.10 and the standard tetex packages from
debian 2.1. Deep in the bowels of my tex distribution, I've changed
the config.ps file so that tex would only use the fonts that are
usually available to acrobat (or at least I think that's what I did),
by commenting out all of the nantokafont.map lines except this one:

p acrobat.map

And still, my output is crap. (yes, I did a texhash after changing
everything, although not sure if this matters or not. Seemed like a
reasonable thing to do.)

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, pointers of where to look
for answers (dejanews did not prove fruitful, except where I
discovered that other people are having similar problems), I would be
most appreciative.

john
-- 
jseebach@example.com
--
     Ah! Primeval forest!
Afternoon breeze shifts slightly:
      Idling tour buses
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Technical Meeting: March 11 (Sat) 13:00 Temple University Japan
* Topic: "What's new in Perl 5.6"
Guest speaker: Simon Cozens (TLUG Perl guru)
Next Nomikai Meeting:   April 21 (Fri) 19:00 Tengu TokyoEkiMae
--------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan