Re: pdf - and on Windows?

[KHMan]

James Mansion wrote:
> KHMan wrote:
> > 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.
> Quite.
> > With pdfTeX, as with Lout, everybody is using stroked fonts
> pdfTeX I've found fine, but that doesn't use ghostscript does it?

No it outputs directly to PDF, it uses its own internal PDF 
backend, but for Lout, when you specify fonts, and you stick to 
Type 1 or Type 42 (TrueType/OpenType) fonts, then you will always 
end up with the exact stroked fonts that you specified.

Ghostscript sort of flattens the PostScript output from Lout into 
PDF, and a lot of PDF is really a limited subset of PostScript 
which renders fast. This is a well-known process that does not 
involve deep magic, so there is no loss of quality between PS -> 
PDF. Vector graphics and vector fonts remain the same.

> > I am under the impression that Ghostscript works well these days.
> That's encouraging.

If there are specific issues with Ghostscript in the past that are 
niggling you, perhaps it can be discussed here on the list. The 
Type 3 bitmap isn't a Ghostscript problem but a DVI -> PS problem, 
I believe. Conversion from PS -> PDF is pretty straightforward and 
involves no loss of document quality.

So it is not really practical for Lout to duplicate the whole PS 
-> PDF thingy when Ghostscript is such a mature application that 
is well-tested. Besides, conversion to PDF is usually an extra 
line in an automatic build file, so it's not too intrusive.

> > 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'm aware lout itself is fine, but I need a convenient complete 
> toolchain reall, and I'd rather not have to run on *nix all the time, 
> out of habit as much as anything.

Oh sorry, I mean that you can look at the PDF of the User's Guide 
and see if the quality and capabilities is acceptable to you or 
otherwise. The PDFs that we (the wiki maintainers) put up are 
processed using Ghostscript.

> > No Free Software forces any watermarks on the user... I guess maybe 
> > you are discussing a Distiller demo.
> Well, or other pdf generators.  I'm not concerned about using Free 
> Software per se, and will spend money once I'm sure the project is 
> workable.

Ghostscript is widely used and I think it's pretty mature, so I 
think many of us Ghostscript users will try to convince you that 
you don't really need a commercial Distiller, but it's your call. 
:-) What's more important is whether the capabilities matches your 
requirements. Some things, like PDF bookmarks and PDF document 
properties, need a bit of additional work. If you know a scripting 
language, then you can do more things, like what Mark Summerfield 
does.

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