On 7 Apr 2005, at 22:56, Jonathan Baron wrote:

On 04/07/05 22:46, Donald Ingram wrote:
 However LaTeX generated  pdfs sent out as reports are much disliked.

Really?  I don't have this problem.  It may have something to do
with how you make them.  With TeTeX, I use either pdflatex or
dvips followed by dvipdfm.  The latter is required when I have
figures in eps.  (ps2pdf is BAD.)


I have played around with these converters a bit and I think I can add something important here.


As Jonathan says dvipdfm seems to work very well. The only problem I have is that it is not on our unix boxes by default: it is in mikTeX.

ps2pdf in my experience is not the problem in dvi to pdf conversion. I used to think that until I delved into it a bit more. The problem as I understand it is that fonts can be bitmapped and hence disgusting and slow. The trick is to make sure dvips uses Type I fonts. An incantation such as

dvips -Pwww -o file.ps file.dvi

followed by

ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dAutoRotatePages=/None file.ps file.pdf

works for me just as well as dvipdfm


dvipdfm has an advantage over this two-step route to pdf because it knows straight off that it is producing a pdf. dvips plus ps2pdf needs tweaking.


US readers will need letter instead of a4 above. The -dAutoRotatePages is to avoid pages being rotated to make the longest side of the graph coincide with the longest side of the page.

References for this stuff are the LaTeX Graphics Companion and the LaTeX Web Companion.

Off-topic a bit I guess, but in my experience very useful to know, including when you start playing around with seminar, prosper, beamer, pdfscreen etc.

David Scott

_________________________________________________________________
David Scott     Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus
                The University of Auckland, PB 92019
                Auckland        NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830         Fax: +64 9 373 7000
Email:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics

______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html

Reply via email to