Creating high-quality PDF files from LaTeX documents

The usual way of creating PDF files in Linux is by using ps2pdf. This is the default script on many systems that parses the command line and calls ghostscript (gs):

OPTIONS="-dSAFER" while true do case "$1" in -?*) OPTIONS="$OPTIONS $1" ;; *) break ;; esac shift done infile="$1" if [ $# -eq 1 ] then case "${infile}" in -) outfile=- ;; *.eps) base=`basename "${infile}" .eps`; outfile="${base}.pdf" ;; *.ps) base=`basename "${infile}" .ps`; outfile="${base}.pdf" ;; *) base=`basename "${infile}"`; outfile="${base}.pdf" ;; esac else outfile="$2" fi gs $OPTIONS -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -sOutputFile="$outfile" $OPTIONS -c \ .setpdfwrite -f "$infile"

Usage:

ps2pdf myfile.ps myfile.pdf

Unfortunately, when viewed in Acrobat reader, the quality of the text fonts in the PDFs produced by the above script is very poor because of the type of image compression that is used. The following script, which creates PDFs from .dvi files, produces PDFs with high-quality text rendering, at the cost of making the PDF file larger:

# script to make pdf files with good quality text # also turn off image compression in pdf file. dvips -Pamz -Pcmz -o $1.ps $1.dvi ps2pdf -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.2 -dSubsetFonts=true \ -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dAutoFilterColorImages=false \ -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode \ -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode \ -dModoImageFilter=/FlateEncode $1.ps

( Note: I can't take credit for this trick. It was discovered by someone on the Internet.)

Usage:

dvi2pdf myfile

(where "myfile" is a .dvi file). Here is an example of a typical LaTeX file converted to PDF using the above script, viewed in Acroread:

Compare this with a PDF produced by the normal method:

ps2gif

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# != 2 ] ; then
   echo " Usage: ps2gif <file.ps> <file.gif>" 1>&2
   exit 1
else 
   echo "Calling ghostscript to convert, please wait ..." >&2
   gs -sDEVICE=ppmraw -r240x240 -sOutputFile=- -sNOPAUSE \
      -q $1 -c showpage -c quit | pnmcrop| pnmmargin 1| \
      ppmquant 256 | ppmtogif >$2
fi