On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Tim Wright wrote:

[...]

> pdflatex does not handle *postscript* images.

[...]

An _academic_ discussion which will lead to better understanding:

"postscript images" does _not_ exist. However there is such a thing
like a postscript _program_ which, when run, have a "side effect" ;-)
of creating an image (or a bitmap if you wish).

pdf is a document description format.

An analogy could be (not necessary the best): consider a plain html
file and a cgi script wich generates the said html. I hope you get it. 

This is why you could have malicious postscript code (hence the -dSAFER
gs option) but not malicious pdf documents (there were some talks 1-2
years ago about embedding some sort of executable commands in pdf but
I don't know the current state).

Consequences: pdflatex can't include directly postscript because it
can't process it. However you can easily convert the postscript to
pdf and include the result. In this way you can "include" processed
postscript in your docs.

And using pdflatex directly is IMHO better than TeX -> ps -> pdf

On a side issue:
If your pdf looks on screen then you are using the bitmapped version
of computer modern. For many years now all standard CM fonts
(plus some extras) have high quality Type 1 counterparts (thanks to AMS).
There is no reason not to use those, have same metric so your documents
will not change.

To check, see (RedHat/tetex) /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/updmap
You should see a line like:
   type1_default=true

If it's set to "false" then change and run the script.
(sadly until fairly recently RedHat default config was set to "false")

Cheers,
-- 
Ryurick M. Hristev mailto:ryurick.hristev@;canterbury.ac.nz
Computer Systems Manager
University of Canterbury, Physics & Astronomy Dept., New Zealand

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