[lug] LaTeX to Word Doc/RTF

[rm at fabula.de]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 04:58:09PM -0700, Daniel Webb wrote:
> > I've just started job hunting again and have been maintaining two
> > versions:
> >
> >   - PDF as generated by latex (with the most recent GhostScript
> >       tools from: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ which look nice
> >       both on-screen and in print)
> >
> >   - ASCII (from the PDF by cut-'n-paste with minor edits)
> >
> > Ed
> 
>   What is the trick to making the latex to PDF conversion without the PDF
> looking really pixellated on screen?  I'm using the LyX pdflatex option,
> but it still looks bad on screen.  Printed version looks fine.  Why is this?

The reason for this are the fonts you use. TeX/LaTeX by default uses raster 
fonts which make really nice printouts _iff_ you know the printers resolution.
Pstscript and PDF both work with scalable fonts which aren't as perfect but much
more portable. Dvips and pdflatex both embed raster images of the rendered glyphs
into the PDF file (at a reasonable printing resolution - hence the ok looking
print output) but when viewed onscreen acrobat reader has to scale down the 
images which creates those artefacts you mention (unless your screen has 
300 dpi resolution ;-) 

>   I looked on Google for the answer to this, but nothing jumped out at me
> as being anywhere near simple.

Hmmm, the easiest solution is to use Postscript fonts. Either get a set of
the Computer Modern fonts (TeX defaults) in postscript format (if you happen
to like those) or use a different font in your document. If you stay with the
set of standard Adobe fonts (Times/Helvetica/Courier) you can be sure that every
Acrobat reader has them. Otherwise you need to embed the postscript font in the 
PDF file. Pdflatex is able to do this but you need to be aware that you have to
carefully read the font licence - not all font shops allow unrestriced embedding.

 Ralf Mattes
> 
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