dvips: Hypertext caveats
5.4.1 Hypertext caveats
-----------------------
If you intend to go all the way to PDF, you may want to use the standard
35 PostScript fonts exclusively, since other fonts are embedded as
bitmaps by default. The Adobe PDF readers are extremely slow when
dealing with bitmap fonts and the results look terrible on the screen.
Printouts will probably look fine, but may not take full advantage of a
high-resolution printer. Alternatively, you can have your fonts
embedded as Type 1 scalable outlines. The resulting PostScript files
may be larger, but can be effectively rasterized at any resolution.
They can also be converted to PDF files that can be used effectively at
any screen or printer resolution.
To get the TeX fonts embedded in the PostScript file as Type 1 fonts,
add '-Ppdf' to the dvips command line switches. The printout for a run
should look something like this:
dvips report -Ppdf -o report.ps
This is dvips(k) 5.86 Copyright 1999 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
' TeX output 2001.06.15:0837' -> report.ps
<tex.pro><alt-rule.pro><texc.pro><texps.pro><special.pro>.
<cmbx9.pfb><cmsy6.pfb><cmsy7.pfb><cmr5.pfb><cmex10.pfb><cmr9.pfb>
<cmmi7.pfb><cmsy10.pfb><cmmib10.pfb><cmmi10.pfb><cmti10.pfb>
<cmr7.pfb><cmbx10.pfb><cmr10.pfb><cmti9.pfb><cmr12.pfb><cmbx12.pfb>
[1] [2<mean1.ps>] [3<bounce1-00.ps>] [4]
An entry like "<cmr10.pfb>" indicates success: dvips found the
Computer Modern Roman 10 point font in a PostScript Font Binary file,
translated it to an ASCII encoding, and embedded it. You can confirm
this by examining the PostScript output file, looking for the section
starting '%%BeginFont: CMR10' followed by an entry '/FontType 1 def'.
The '-Ppdf' option requires that the relevant outline ('.pfa' or
'.pfb') files be installed (⇒Font concepts). For example, the
'cmr10' file might be in
'/usr/share/texmf/fonts/type1/bluesky/cm/cmr10.pfb'. Your TeX
distribution may make those fonts available in a separate optional
package (e.g., 'tetex-extra' in Debian). Failing that, commercial
versions of the Computer Modern fonts are available from Blue Sky;
public domain versions, in particular, the lm and cm-super font
families, are available from CTAN and in TeX distributions.
You can convert a PostScript file to PDF using 'distill', which comes
with Adobe Acrobat, or 'ps2pdf', which comes with Ghostscript. The
'ps2pdf' that comes with 'Ghostscript' version 6.0 or earlier will not
embed Type 1 fonts. Current recommendations are GNU Ghostscript 6.51 or
Aladdin Ghostscript 7.0. You can check the fonts in a PDF file with
Acrobat Reader by selecting the menu entries 'File|Document Info|Fonts'.
Also, the Adobe distillers prior to 2.1 drop trailing space
characters (character code 32) from strings. Unfortunately, the
PostScript fonts use this character code for characters other than space
(notably the Greek letter psi in the 'Symbol' font), and so these
characters are dropped. This bug is fixed in version 2.1.
If you can't upgrade, one workaround is to change all the trailing
blanks in strings to a character code that isn't in the font. This
works because the default behavior is to substitute a blank for a
missing character, i.e., the distiller is fooled into substituting the
right character. For instance, with the Blue Sky fonts, you can
globally replace ' )' with '\200)' (with 'sed', for example) and get the
desired result. With the public domain fonts, you will probably have to
use a character code in the range 128 to 191 since these fonts duplicate
the first 32 characters starting at 192 to avoid MS-DOS problems.
For more information on the use of TeX to produce PDF files, see the
article "Creating quality Adobe PDF files from TeX with DVIPS" by
Kendall Whitehouse of Adobe. Adobe seems not to offer the article any
more, but copies are available elsewhere:
<http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ralph/MathOnWeb/TeXPDF.html>
<http://www.utdallas.edu/~cantrell/online/543e.html>
You may also want to check "Notes on converting (La)TeX documents to
robust PDF using Rokicki's dvips and Acrobat Distiller" by Timothy P.
Van Zandt:
<http://www.emrg.com/texpdf.htmlhttp://zandtwerk.insead.fr/tex2pdf.html>.
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dvips: Hypertext
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