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

[Selva Nair <selva@example.com>]

Thanks a mil, Steve, for that detailed post.
It appears to answer most of the troubles I have had with gs->pdf.
Thanks again.

Selva  

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>  >>>>> "John" == John Seebach <jseebach@example.com> writes:
>  
>      John> I'm wondering: Does anyone have any idea how to go from tex
>      John> to a .pdf document without the output looking like complete
>      John> garbage? Is it even possible?
>  
>  pdftex probably will do a better job as it generates the output
>  without going through ghostscript AFAIK.  Very soon Ghostscript output
>  will be nearly as good as Adobe's if you can get the fonts, but at the
>  moment Adobe lossage makes it very hard.
>  
>  (I don't do PDFs, they're not searchable or editable.)
>  
>      John> Unfortunately, this appears to be no fault of Acrobat's, as
>  
>  Wrong, unfortunately.  Adobe doesn't implement their own PDF specs in
>  Acrobat, and they are unwilling to say precisely what they do
>  implement.  This leaves the Ghostscript developers with nothing they
>  can do but keep poking until Acrobat stops barfing.  One of the things
>  that got sacrified until v6.0 was Type 3 fonts, which are commonly
>  used in PDF files.
>  
>      John> font that's not one of the 14 standard postscript fonts.  I
>      John> don't think I'm doing this.
>  
>  You are, I suspect.  The 14 standard fonts are helvetica, courier, et
>  al.  acrobat.map uses several others IIRC (could be wrong, but I think
>  I remember Peter bitching about this too).
>  
>      John> I'm using ghostscript 5.10
>  
>  Upgrade.  6.0 is out; most of the Adobe Acrobat-induced lossage is
>  fixed, but not all.
>  
>  ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin
>  
>  Also get the JPEG source from the same site, or someplace like UUnet.
>  After unpacking the Ghostscript source, put it in gs6.0/src/jpeg.
>  I usually unpack into a sibling of gs6.0 and make a symlink, but you
>  can just unpack it directly since pretty much everything except
>  Ghostscript can and should use the libjpeg.so provided by your distro.
>  
>  Say what, you say?  PDFs often include images, and ghostscript WILL
>  LOSE if you use the Debian libjpeg.so (because Adobe thinks it knows
>  JPEG better than the Joint Photographic Experts Group does, and
>  implements its own "standard").  It would be a shame to get the fonts
>  right and lose on a picture or two....  You don't need zlib or libpng,
>  as the Debian .sos are fine.
>  
>  Ghostscript is a pretty smooth build; I recommend figuring out where
>  Debian puts all the fonts-n-stuff and overwriting them with the 6.0
>  fonts available at the above site.  Then fix the GS_LIB_DEFAULT macro
>  in gs6.0/src/unix-gcc.mak to point (just add ":/path/to/deb/stuff").
>  You also need to fix the XINCLUDE and XLIBDIRS macros (I checked the
>  spelling, those are correct) to point to /usr/X11R6/{include,lib}.
>  Change SHARE_LIBPNG and SHARE_ZLIB to 1.  Do NOT do this with
>  SHARE_LIBJPEG, as mentioned above.
>  
>  Take a look at the DEVICE_DEVS macros at the bottom and Devices.htm
>  (or maybe it's Drivers.htm) in the doc directory.  You probably don't
>  need all those banana-flavored printers....
>  
>  Now, make a symlink 'ln -s src/unix-gcc.mak Makefile' in the top
>  directory, make, and make install.
>  
>  I suggest you read the fine manual to be found in convenient HTML form
>  in gs6.0/doc directory, 'cause I'm going from memory, then start the
>  make and mix a margarita.
>  
>  You might want to put it somewhare other than on your normal PATH
>  if you also use gs-aladdin-vflib for Japanese processing.
>  
>  -- 
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--------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Technical Meeting: March 11 (Sat) 13:00 Temple University Japan
* Topic: "What's new in Perl 5.6"
Guest speaker: Simon Cozens (TLUG Perl guru)
Next Nomikai Meeting:   April 21 (Fri) 19:00 Tengu TokyoEkiMae
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more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan