[lug] ps2pdf and correct/nice fonts

[Wayde Allen]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Ralf Mattes wrote:

> Yes, they anounced it lately. I installed their beta of FrameMaker
> and was impressed both by their fast support (got some bugfixes mailed
> within a day even so i run it on Debian which isn't on their list of
> supported distributions) and also their licensing-the beta is valid
> until December 2000 (this actually saved me from having to buy FM
> for Windows (and another box for running Windows on :-))

Yes, I was pretty excited about it.  I haven't got a copy yet myself
though.

> > Another option I was just playing with yesterday (I've got a LaTeX paper
> > that Microwave Journal wants to publish) is to run the LaTeX document
> > through the latex2html converter and then import the html document into
> > your word processor of choice. 
> 
> I found that too much structural information gets lost this way.

I was actually pleasantly surprised.  The html document generated by
latex2html was quite true to the original paper and included the equations
as png graphics.  I did need to set the sectioning switch to force the
creation of a single large html document rather than a collection of
subforms for each document section.

The resulting file imported rather nicely into Applixword and I was able
to export that to a plain text file and to an MSWord doc file. There is of
course a fair amount of cleanup work that needs to be done, the equations
need to be added back in using the MSWord equation editor for instance,
but it saves retyping the whole thing.  That doesn't surprise me though. 
Equations are almost guaranteed never to convert between any word
processor, and often fail even between different versions of the same
word processor.  I guess the font info gets lost too, but in my case the
magazine editor will format the document how they want anyway. 

> For Windows clients i would really go for the RTF output of jade.
> Docbook (or better SGML) is wounderfull for multi-target documentation.
> If you can live with the docbook DTD (or don't fear writing scheme
> code for the stylesheets) this is really the most flexible tool.

Probably so, I just installed Jade a month or so ago.  Haven't had a
chance to play with it.  This sort of thing might make it worth my effort.
I guess Framemaker stores its data in SGML format too, so combining these
tools might make for a very powerful solution.  Looks like I've got some
reading and experimenting to do.


- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)