Re: tlug: tex/dvips to pdf: dekiru?

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

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

    John> Stephen: I'm pretty sure that the acrobat.map file only
    John> includes standard "postscript" fonts. In fact, it appears to
    John> be pretty small subset of those fonts -- Courier, Helvetica,
    John> Symbol, Times, and the ever-useful ZapfDingbats.

OK.  Ghostscript 5.10 is very likely quite buggy, especially from the
point of view of a recent Adobe Acrobat.  I wouldn't bet that the
person who wrote the comments about ps2pdf updated them for the very
rapidly changing state of the pdfwrite driver at that time.

Oops, that's true, but I just read Simon's post.  Since the TeX
documents specify Computer Modern, that's what you're going to
get---in bitmap form, rasterized by Metafont.  You might be able to
tweak that process to get something nicer.

But what you need to do is go into the TeX and dvips docs and find out
how to use real scalable fonts in your TeX documents.  ps2pdf can't do
anything about it unless you tell dvips to use the AMS Type 1 font
instead of the original Metafont font by Knuth.

    John> (but not real adobe postscript, at something like $140 a

Ghostscript's Adobe-alike fonts have gotten a lot better, big
improvements in both the *fonts*-5.50 and *fonts*-6.0 distributions.

    John> pop. Hmm.  Whenever I start to think about TeX (or X) and
    John> fonts, I stop, as I immediately realize that I have reached
    John> the limit of my understanding on the subject. As much as I
    John> don't miss Windows, I do occasionally get a little
    John> misty-eyed when I think back on the days of having just one
    John> @#$* font folder).

Well, this is (sort of) the goal of the X-TT and FreeType projects,
and close to the idea of VFlib.  It's a shame that X-TT and VFlib are
implemented in such an ad hoc way without coordination with other
projects.  (VFlib itself may not be a problem, I don't know much about
its code, but App-vflib is typically implemented in a way such that no
sane maintainer for App would accept the patches.  :-( )

    John> live out in the sticks, and there's no working ghostscript
    John> driver for the printer I have access to.

Have you tried gs-aladdin-vflib?  I think it has a lot more drivers
(several of dubious legality due to their licenses, but ...).  Debian
doesn't seem to have anything later than 5.10, but I know the patch
has been updated to gs-5.50.  (You still won't be able to write decent
PDFs with that, most likely, but you might find you can write to your
printer.)

Adding these to gs-6.0 isn't hard, as such things go, but there are
likely to be a number of gotchas.

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