tlug: tex/dvips to pdf: dekiru?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John Seebach <jseebach@example.com> writes:

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

pdftex probably will do a better job as it generates the output
without going through ghostscript AFAIK.  Very soon Ghostscript output
will be nearly as good as Adobe's if you can get the fonts, but at the
moment Adobe lossage makes it very hard.

(I don't do PDFs, they're not searchable or editable.)

    John> Unfortunately, this appears to be no fault of Acrobat's, as

Wrong, unfortunately.  Adobe doesn't implement their own PDF specs in
Acrobat, and they are unwilling to say precisely what they do
implement.  This leaves the Ghostscript developers with nothing they
can do but keep poking until Acrobat stops barfing.  One of the things
that got sacrified until v6.0 was Type 3 fonts, which are commonly
used in PDF files.

    John> font that's not one of the 14 standard postscript fonts.  I
    John> don't think I'm doing this.

You are, I suspect.  The 14 standard fonts are helvetica, courier, et
al.  acrobat.map uses several others IIRC (could be wrong, but I think
I remember Peter bitching about this too).

    John> I'm using ghostscript 5.10

Upgrade.  6.0 is out; most of the Adobe Acrobat-induced lossage is
fixed, but not all.

ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin

Also get the JPEG source from the same site, or someplace like UUnet.
After unpacking the Ghostscript source, put it in gs6.0/src/jpeg.
I usually unpack into a sibling of gs6.0 and make a symlink, but you
can just unpack it directly since pretty much everything except
Ghostscript can and should use the libjpeg.so provided by your distro.

Say what, you say?  PDFs often include images, and ghostscript WILL
LOSE if you use the Debian libjpeg.so (because Adobe thinks it knows
JPEG better than the Joint Photographic Experts Group does, and
implements its own "standard").  It would be a shame to get the fonts
right and lose on a picture or two....  You don't need zlib or libpng,
as the Debian .sos are fine.

Ghostscript is a pretty smooth build; I recommend figuring out where
Debian puts all the fonts-n-stuff and overwriting them with the 6.0
fonts available at the above site.  Then fix the GS_LIB_DEFAULT macro
in gs6.0/src/unix-gcc.mak to point (just add ":/path/to/deb/stuff").
You also need to fix the XINCLUDE and XLIBDIRS macros (I checked the
spelling, those are correct) to point to /usr/X11R6/{include,lib}.
Change SHARE_LIBPNG and SHARE_ZLIB to 1.  Do NOT do this with
SHARE_LIBJPEG, as mentioned above.

Take a look at the DEVICE_DEVS macros at the bottom and Devices.htm
(or maybe it's Drivers.htm) in the doc directory.  You probably don't
need all those banana-flavored printers....

Now, make a symlink 'ln -s src/unix-gcc.mak Makefile' in the top
directory, make, and make install.

I suggest you read the fine manual to be found in convenient HTML form
in gs6.0/doc directory, 'cause I'm going from memory, then start the
make and mix a margarita.

You might want to put it somewhare other than on your normal PATH
if you also use gs-aladdin-vflib for Japanese processing.

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