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How to Produce Portable PDF Files from LaTeX
Heartfelt thanks to Jason Flinn, Joshua LeVasseur, Barton Massey, and Erez Zadok for their contributions to these instructions.
- Use dvips to produce a postscript file from your DVI, and then ps2pdf to
produce the final PDF. Tools that produce PDF directly from DVI/TEX files
don't always do a good job.
- Check to make sure your installation of ps2pdf invokes ps2pdf14. If not, invoke it explicitly.
- Be sure to use appropriate fonts. Times Roman is best, and it is included in the
usetex-v1.cls package.
- If you are generating figures as EPS from a Microsoft application:
- Use portrait orientation. Landscape generates visuals outside the EPS bounding box, which prevents the files from printing in Quark.
- Force the EPS files embed all fonts, via the Windows printer dialog boxes.
- Force your gnuplot EPS files to embed fonts, using the fontfile command. Example:
set terminal postscript eps enhanced "NimbusSanL-Regu" fontfile "uhvr8a.pfb"
embeds gnuplot's default Helvetica font in the output.
The name of the font is NimbusSanL-Regu, and the font file is
uhvr8a.pfb. The Nimbus fonts are a family of free fonts
distributed with LaTeX.
The font file has a line near the top which defines the abbreviated font
name:
/FontName /NimbusSanL-Regu def
Look for similar lines in other font files if you want to change the font. Some
families, for example, the
Adobe afm fonts, may be incompatible with gnuplot.
- Most latex distributions contain a dvips tool that by default
formats the postscript file for A4 paper. YTo force dvips to
produce a format for U.S. letter style, first try:
dvips -Ppdf -Pcmz -Pamz -t letter -D 600 -G0
If that doesn't work, try -G1 instead of -G0:
dvips -Ppdf -Pcmz -Pamz -t letter -D 600 -G1
You may just prefer to use pdflatex, which normally does the
right thing and avoids the dvi step altogether.
- dvips may not include bitmapped fonts in the produced PS correctly.
If you then produce a PDF file, you may get errors from acroread or xpdf,
because it will miss those fonts. When latex formats the round bullets
for lists, it uses such a bitmapped font. The solution is to tell
dvips to include bitmapped fonts in the PS file, as follows:
dvips -Pcmz -t letter -o foo.ps foo.dvi
If you don't use -Pcmz, or you use another -P option, you may find odd
font problems in your paper (for example, "f" followed by "i" becomes one
character or is replaced with the British Sterling character).
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