PDF

[Gunthard Mueller]

Good point.
In fact, some of these PostScript-to-PDF converter programs are of
extremely high quality.
However, some of them don't allow you to directly integrate fonts into the
PDF file.
So it's important to integrate the fonts at the stage when you produce the
PostScript file, i.e. integrate the fonts into the PostScript file ("print
the fonts together with the document"). Then convert the result to PDF.
There are ways of adding fonts to existing PDF files (even with standard
UNIX commands), but the process is really very error-prone and the result
is mostly quite inefficient (large/slow).

Nevertheless, some of the code that these converters produce does not
totally conform with Adobe specs, and also there are some rather weird
converters out there which really produce a lot of gibberish. So generally
I really advise the use of the original PDF generator, i.e. Acrobat. (I
promise I don't own any Adobe shares........)

Best regards,
gm at e-ternals.com
----------------------------------------------
e-ternals.com - digitizing and publishing

Robert Zydenbos wrote:

> Am 12 Dec 2000 schrieb Gunthard Mueller:
>
> > (2.1) Adobe Acrobat (PDF files) PDF files include everything,
> > including fonts. [...] This format is a derivative of PostScript,
> > which is an indispensable part of many operating systems, so this
> > technology is safe and here to stay. The Acrobat writer software is
> > widely available and low-cost. Probably your  institute already
> > has a license, I would guess.
>
> There was a bit of discussion about this on another list recently. If
> you work with Linux or FreeBSD, the Acrobat writer software is not
> even necessary for producing PDFs. You write your text (with
> StarOffice, TeX, anything), but instead of printing it on paper you
> print it to a PostScript file. With the free program "ps2pdf" this can
> be converted to the PDF format.
>
> In that other discussion, it was mentioned that also under Windows
> it should be possible to generate PDF's using the LaTeX
> distribution for Windows called 'MikTeX.'
>
> RZ