[lug] LaTeX and distilling to PDF

[Ronald Kumon]

On Fri, 18 May 2001, J. Wayde Allen wrote:

> I've recently been working on some technical papers writen in LaTeX, and
> although the papers print fine I seem to be having probelms distilling
> them to pdf.  

Have you tried embedding the fonts into the Postscript file?   Under teTeX
this is done with the command
      dvips -Pcmz -o document.ps documentsource.dvi
which causes dvips to read the "config.cmz" file in the dvips config
directory and load the necessary font information into document.ps.  The
embedding increases the file size, but I have found it difficult to get
good quality, completely portable PDF files without it.  

Also, I use a package called "pstill" for the Postscript to PDF
conversion, which is freely available for noncommercial use under Linux
(http://www.wizards.de/~frank/pstill.html).  You have to configure the 
program to know where all your fonts are, but after that it works quite
well.
--Ron