Re: pdf - and on Windows?

[KHMan]

James Mansion wrote:
> [snip]
> Is lout's postscript focus going to be a hindrance for day to day use?  
> I'd rather not cough
> for the full Adobe product until I know I'll actually make it as far as 
> publishing something,
> rather than fantasizing about doing so, but if I'm going to give it much 
> of a try I'll want
> something that produces good looking pdfs.  I've not been.very impressed 
> by ghostscript
> as a back end to TeX - I'm hoping to use something that embeds fonts as 
> needed.

Speaking as a off-and-on user of Lout... Can you be more specific 
about "not been.very impressed by ghostscript"? It used to be that 
the TeX DVI -> PS -> PDF toolchain produces Type 3 fonts which are 
rendered bitmaps from the Metafont stroked originals. That looked 
horrible and rendered slowly. But AFAIK, nobody ever generates a 
document with Type 3 fonts anymore. With pdfTeX, as with Lout, 
everybody is using stroked fonts, usually the standard Adobe set 
or embedded Type 42 fonts. I am under the impression that 
Ghostscript works well these days.

> Can anyone recommend what I should install to give lout a fair showing?

Not sure what you mean, but often we point people to the User's 
Guide as an example of what Lout can produce. You can get them 
here: http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/Documentation

> I don't mind something that watermarks pages in a demo version so long 
> as the
> previews in Acrobat Reader on screen look good.

No Free Software forces any watermarks on the user... I guess 
maybe you are discussing a Distiller demo.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia