[lug] LaTeX and distilling to PDF

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Fri, 18 May 2001, Ferdinand Schmid wrote:

> I hadn't followed this thread earlier since I don't know much about
> Latex to begin with.  But I recently figured out that it works really
> well to print just about anything to a postscript file and then convert
> that to a pdf file using ps2pdf.  The only problem are landscape
> documents, which print 90 degrees rotated.  Those pdf files can be
> rotated using pdfrotate, a nifty perl script.

I had initially tried making the postscript document and converting it
using ps2pdf.  It works, but the text was really fuzzy.  I had just
figured that this might be a failing of ps2pdf.  When the same thing
happend using the commercial acrobat distiller I figured something more
was going on.  It turns out that dvips tends to use Type 3 bitmaped fonts
by default.  The pdfelatex command on the other hand uses the Type 1 fonts
and goes directly to pdf.

This is all covered in the archived thread.

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)