Re: [Plplot-devel] Printable PDF documentation

[<jc...@fe...>]

On Monday 26 January 2004 16:58, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
| On 2004-01-26 10:41+0100 Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
| > * Arjen Markus <arj...@wl...> [2004-01-26 08:20]:
| > > The problem is not so much reading the PDF file, but rather
| > > printing the contents (I am, I am afraid, rather old-fashioned: I
| > > like reading large amounts of text from paper much and much
| > > better than from the screen :).
| >
| > We distribute already a PS file with the tarball, which prints
| > nicely. However, as Arjen pointed out privately to me, PDF files
| > are more convenient than PS files for Windows users.  We have then
| > to find a way to distribute a printable PDF file for Windows.
| >
| > Distributing such a file with the tarball is problematic, because
| > it must be produced with free tools from the CVS sources.  I tried
| > to use ps2pdf from the Ghostscript suite to produce a PDF file from
| > the PS one.  I put the resulting file in:
| >
| >    
| > http://people.debian.org/~rafael/plplot-5.2.1.rc2.5.3.0-printable.p
| >df
| >
| > It prints correctly from Acroread, but has no hyperlinks and the
| > characters look simply horrible on the screen.
|
| This gets back to the pdf verification problem; if acroread prints
| certain files okay but not our documentation ones, you don't know
| whether the pdf form of our documentation is non-standard or whether
| it is just a print bug for acroread for complicated files or a Linux
| printing bug.
|
| For LBP I recently discovered the solution to the "horrible
| characters on screen" problem with ps2pdf.  In the dvips step specify
| the -Ppdf -G options, and suddenly ps2pdf results look good on
| screen.

The problem is that the generated dvi file ask for "ec" fonts, and 
bitmap versions of them are generated and included in the ps file (look 
at the .ps file:
   ...
   The following cm font will be type-1, scalable
   %!PS-AdobeFont-1.1: CMSY7 1.0
   ...
   The following ec font will be bitmap
   %DVIPSBitmapFont: Fb ectt1095

The solution would be to use type-1 fonts from the very beginning, or 
generate a latex file instead of a dvi, and then change its preamble (I 
use  \usepackage{ae,aecompl}) and then use jadetex and "dvips -Pcmz")

Joao