On 24-Oct-01 M. Chapman wrote: > So now I am curious why (apparently under UNIX/Linux) Ghostview performs > better on-screen than Reader.
My opinion: acroread/Linux (or any *nix) is crappy. It crashes all the time on me, colors pages in bright yellow background if I leave through longer documents, output is garbage postscript I have to clean up using ghostscript (is there a unnecessary loop here converting good ps to pdf to get crappy ps back?) as filter or the postscript printers here at work (not too cheap and recent things, mind) will refuse to print. We *do* have a unix setup here and pdf is not convienient. For this I completely blame adobe for a very bad client implementation. Quite a lot of the crash problems could be library imcompatibilities which got rather bad in Linux from libc5 to glibc2 (libc6?) and again 2.0 and 2.1 are not quite compatible. And for bad screen output one major point is: - ghostscript handles anitaliasing internally now (since aladdin 6.0, gnu versions I don't know) - acrobat does not The newest XFree86 4.X does have antialiasing support, but almost no application is using it up too now and certainly not the acrobat reader. So the screen output is necessarily worse then anything one can see on a winXX screen. acrobat for WinXX is a different thing BTW. It is rather stable for any document I encountered so far, its fast in displaying (in contrast to terribly slow as acroread4 for Dec Alphas/OSF4) and good readability on screen. I think gsview/ghostscript for winXX can get a similar on-screen quality, but that may depend strongly on the used fonts in the document. I certainly would prefer ps -- but I readily admit pdf has some advantage on WinXX platforms with no real postscipt printer around anyway. And if that's the huge majority of users/downloaders I guess thats the way. We Unix types will find some way ;-) K.-H. _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
