pdfLaTeX vs LaTeX -> dvips -> ps2pdf
Grant Edwards
references, and am left with one question: What are the
advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
Assuming pdfLaTeX isn't entirely an academic exercise (though
there's nothing wrong with that, either), there must have been
some problem that it solves that wasn't being solved by the
existing tool set.
Including EPS figures in pdfLaTeX seems to require an extra
step (epstopdf), while including bitmap images in LaTeX
requires an extra step (converting them to EPS).
Are there packages for pdfLaTeX that do the things that
pstricks does?
Previewing and printing with xdvi/dvips seems a lot less
resource intensive than using a Postscript rendering engine
like acroread.
pdfLaTeX appears to create bookmarks and hyper-links based on
document structure (the bookmarks I can live without, but being
able to follow references inside acroread is pretty cool). You
don't get this with the other combination of tools.
Are there any other visible difference when viewing the PDF
files created by the two options?
Is there any difference in hardcopy output between the two?
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Yow! I'm having a
at quadraphonic sensation
visi.com of two winos alone in a
steel mill!
David Carlisle
> I've been browsing through the pdfTeX FAQ and some related
> references, and am left with one question: What are the
> advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
> combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
It's about 100000 times quicker which makes the edit-preview cycle
far more fun. Also until very recently ps2pdf was not an option unless
you were using the 14 `base' fonts as it could not handle type1 fonts at
all. Apparently new beta releases add this feature. (The last step
could always be done with the commercial distiller program though)
> Assuming pdfLaTeX isn't entirely an academic exercise (though
> there's nothing wrong with that, either), there must have been
> some problem that it solves that wasn't being solved by the
> existing tool set.
speed, and also as it knows it is making pdf it can use this information
in ways not so easy if going via dvi, eg to get multi-line links.
> Including EPS figures in pdfLaTeX seems to require an extra
> step (epstopdf), while including bitmap images in LaTeX
> requires an extra step (converting them to EPS).
bitmaps can be included in png format.
>
> Are there packages for pdfLaTeX that do the things that
> pstricks does?
no
> Previewing and printing with xdvi/dvips seems a lot less
> resource intensive than using a Postscript rendering engine
> like acroread.
acroread isn't a postscript renderer, that's the whole point
pdf is more akin to dvi than ps in many ways: it isn't a
programming language.
> pdfLaTeX appears to create bookmarks and hyper-links based on
> document structure (the bookmarks I can live without, but being
> able to follow references inside acroread is pretty cool). You
> don't get this with the other combination of tools.
yes you do, bookmarks and links should work with dvips as well.
They should work already at the dvi level in xdvi if you use the
default options to hyperref.
> Are there any other visible difference when viewing the PDF
> files created by the two options?
With `current' (not beta) versions of ps2pdf yes, a lot if fonts
other than times are used.
> Is there any difference in hardcopy output between the two?
ditto
David
Grant Edwards
>far more fun. Also until very recently ps2pdf was not an option unless
>you were using the 14 `base' fonts as it could not handle type1 fonts at
>all.
Yup -- ps2pdf output with CMR fonts wasn't a pretty sight.
>> Previewing and printing with xdvi/dvips seems a lot less
>> resource intensive than using a Postscript rendering engine
>> like acroread.
>
>acroread isn't a postscript renderer, that's the whole point
>pdf is more akin to dvi than ps in many ways: it isn't a
>programming language.
What?! I thought that PDF was basically an extension to PS
(bookmarks, links, etc.), and that the page description was
done with PS. If acroread isn't rendering the PS that's inside
PDF files, then what is?
>> pdfLaTeX appears to create bookmarks and hyper-links based on
>> document structure (the bookmarks I can live without, but being
>> able to follow references inside acroread is pretty cool). You
>> don't get this with the other combination of tools.
>
>yes you do, bookmarks and links should work with dvips as well.
>They should work already at the dvi level in xdvi if you use the
>default options to hyperref.
Ah. Didn't know about hyperref.
>> Are there any other visible difference when viewing the PDF
>> files created by the two options?
>
>With `current' (not beta) versions of ps2pdf yes, a lot if fonts
>other than times are used.
>
>> Is there any difference in hardcopy output between the two?
>
>ditto
You mean the same document text in the same font will be
formatted differently?
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! I'm in direct contact
at with many advanced fun
visi.com CONCEPTS.
Robin Fairbairns
>>acroread isn't a postscript renderer, that's the whole point
>>pdf is more akin to dvi than ps in many ways: it isn't a
>>programming language.
>
>What?! I thought that PDF was basically an extension to PS
>(bookmarks, links, etc.), and that the page description was
>done with PS. If acroread isn't rendering the PS that's inside
>PDF files, then what is?
no: pdf doesn't have any of the programmability of postscript. the
interpreter is correspondingly simpler. (it says here...)
>>> Is there any difference in hardcopy output between the two?
>>
>>ditto
>
>You mean the same document text in the same font will be
>formatted differently?
not formatted differently, just the output will look different,
because of the grotty treatment of type 3 fonts by acrobat reader.
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
ai...@rsc.anu.edu.au.invalid
> I've been browsing through the pdfTeX FAQ and some related
> references, and am left with one question: What are the
> advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
> combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
I wondered the same thing too. Other people have given particular
answers to your questions, but I thought I'd share my experiences and
thoughts about this stuff.
The first thing I wanted to do was convert a LaTeX'ed CV to pdf,
because the people at the stupid recruiting agency thing couldn't deal
with anything else -- I got a classic "Postscript? What is that?"
response when I was suggesting the formats I could provide.
So, I thought I was very clever, as I had ghostscript, and I could made
nice pdf .. right? Wrong. I couldn't. The fonts looked crappy, so I
looked for an answer, and dejanews did provide it. So my lovely "Type3"
CM fonts were getting brutalised by pdf. I tried the \usepackage{times}
and that worked, \usepackage{helvet} did not. Hmm. Turns out that is
the well known "printer resident" font thing .. or something. So GS
only supports a limited subset of fonts -- if you wanted to do maths
and make it look nice you'd have to get PS versions of a printer
resident font, like mathtimes, which I know nothing about. Apparently
v6.0 of GS is supposed to be able to include any sort of postscript
font. If you want to do this *right now* and don't have access to
distiller, then pstill is your friend. Available from here:
<http://www.this.net/~frank/pstill.html>
This will include any PS font, but you have the PS version first. PS
versions of CM are available on CTAN (in the fonts directory). This
available for a number of different platforms I seem to recall.
Once you've done that you go "Boring!" and want to do more funky stuff,
like using the linking capabilities of pdf. The next step might be
something like dvipdfm by Mark A. Wicks. It is actually pretty damn
good, and quite a bit faster than pstill. I found it did the same job
of a vanilla LaTeX job as pstill, though the latter is *much* easier to
install if you don't have write access to your unix tex install
(assuming this is what you use - I'm not sure if dvipdfm is available
on other platforms). It has the ability to include all sorts of
specials to do fun pdf stuff, and theoretically the same dvi file could
just be dvips'ed and printed. I had some problem installing it the
first time I tried, as we didn't have the kpathsea libraries
installed. The executables were there, but not the libraries. I tried
it again some time later, and it worked, but it wasn't straightforward
for me.
If you really want to go the whole hog and use pdf for "power point"
like presentations and such, then pdfTeX is the way to I reckon. I
haven't been able to install it on my system -- it seems difficult to
configure it if you don't have it residing in the same place as the
base TeX installation, though I would welcome hints from anyone who has
done this succcessfully (I am using teTeX, not sure which version). To
get an idea what can be done, have a look at the files:
macros/latex/contrib/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
macros/latex/contrib/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
on your local CTAN archive. WAY neat I reckon.
I use a teTeX system on a sun server as a workhorse, and an OzTeX
installation on my Mac for other bits and pieces. Unfortunately pdfTeX
ain't an option for OzTeX (it uses a different type of TeX "tree"
thing, and it would be problematic). I tried installing CMacTeX, and
found it LARGE and a little painful, but it has this capability
I think.
Hope this was useful.
Aidan
jhef...@my-deja.com
> macros/latex/contrib/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
>
> on your local CTAN archive. WAY neat I reckon.
>
macros/latex/contrib/supported/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
Way neat, indeed.
Jim Hefferon
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Grant Edwards
>Grant Edwards <grant@nowhere.> wrote:
>
>> I've been browsing through the pdfTeX FAQ and some related
>> references, and am left with one question: What are the
>> advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
>> combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
>
>I wondered the same thing too. Other people have given particular
>answers to your questions, but I thought I'd share my experiences and
>thoughts about this stuff.
>
>The first thing I wanted to do was convert a LaTeX'ed CV to pdf,
>because the people at the stupid recruiting agency thing couldn't deal
>with anything else -- I got a classic "Postscript? What is that?"
>response when I was suggesting the formats I could provide.
You're lucky. When I e-mailed PDF format resumes to HR people,
they had no clue what either PDF or Postscript was. The only
thing they know was MS Word. I'll be damned if I'm going to
let MS Word mangle my lovingly typeset resume. I e-mailed
instructions to one secretary explaining how to download
acrobat reader (and she acutally did it!). Her boss, OTOH, was
utterly clueless. I had to fax her a copy.
>To get an idea what can be done, have a look at the files:
>macros/latex/contrib/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
>macros/latex/contrib/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
I think that should be
macros/latex/contrib/supported/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
That is, indeed, pretty cool. It certainly puts PowerPoint to
shame.
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! I don't know WHY I
at said that... I think it
visi.com came from the FILLINGS inmy
read molars...
Stephen Peters
> >acroread isn't a postscript renderer, that's the whole point
> >pdf is more akin to dvi than ps in many ways: it isn't a
> >programming language.
>
> What?! I thought that PDF was basically an extension to PS
> (bookmarks, links, etc.), and that the page description was
> done with PS. If acroread isn't rendering the PS that's inside
> PDF files, then what is?
PDF can do all the PS low-level rendering, but removes all the
programming constructs. It then adds better font handling, bookmarks,
links, and a file model that makes it easy to jump to a given page in
a several-megabyte long PDF file.
The various PostScript distillers effectively do all the PostScript
language translation and turn them into the straightforward drawing
operations. The overhead you associate with a postscript renderer is
mostly due to the language aspects; with PDF, that goes away and you
can make the page display very fast indeed.
--
Stephen L. Peters por...@ai.mit.edu
PGP fingerprint: BFA4 D0CF 8925 08AE 0CA5 CCDD 343D 6AC6
"Poodle: The other white meat." -- Sherman, Sherman's Lagoon
MicroPress, Inc.
wrote:
>I've been browsing through the pdfTeX FAQ and some related
>references, and am left with one question: What are the
>advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
>combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
One-pass processing is always advantageous: faster.
>
>Assuming pdfLaTeX isn't entirely an academic exercise (though
>there's nothing wrong with that, either), there must have been
>some problem that it solves that wasn't being solved by the
>existing tool set.
>
>Including EPS figures in pdfLaTeX seems to require an extra
>step (epstopdf), while including bitmap images in LaTeX
>requires an extra step (converting them to EPS).
>
>Are there packages for pdfLaTeX that do the things that
>pstricks does?
PdfLaTeX (or, more properly, PdfTeX) does not have an integrated
PS->PDF converter which would be required for PStricks or other
inline PostScript. The only TeX->PDF compiler that does have it
is VTeX (http://www.micropress-inc.com). Free versions of it are
available for linux and os/2, see
http://www.micropress-inc.com/linux
http://www.micropress-inc.com/os2
and a commercial exists for Windows.
>
>Previewing and printing with xdvi/dvips seems a lot less
>resource intensive than using a Postscript rendering engine
>like acroread.
>
>pdfLaTeX appears to create bookmarks and hyper-links based on
>document structure (the bookmarks I can live without, but being
>able to follow references inside acroread is pretty cool). You
>don't get this with the other combination of tools.
>
>Are there any other visible difference when viewing the PDF
>files created by the two options?
>
>Is there any difference in hardcopy output between the two?
>
>--
Matthew Lovell
What can one do to provide a BoundingBox for a .eps file which lacks
one?
I'm playing around with using pdflatex to produce my wife's thesis.
Most of the EPS files have converted fine, but some lack the box in
the header. While no problems have arisen using the dvips->distiller
path, I'm wondering how pdflatex will treat an image with no size
info.
Thanks!
Matt
--
Matthew Lovell
HP Workstation Systems Lab
mailto:lov...@fc.hp.com
Robin Fairbairns
>Slightly off topic, but...
>
>What can one do to provide a BoundingBox for a .eps file which lacks
>one?
the ghostscript script ps2epsi generally does the trick.
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
Timothy Murphy
>>I've been browsing through the pdfTeX FAQ and some related
>>references, and am left with one question: What are the
>>advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
>>combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
>One-pass processing is always advantageous: faster.
Surely computers are so fast nowadays that this factor is irrelevant?
Personally, the advantage of pdfLaTeX for me is that it works
while the alternative route does not.
(I admit that this is almost certainly my fault.)
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: t...@maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
David Carlisle
> Surely computers are so fast nowadays that this factor is irrelevant?
Timothy, I want your computer!!!
David
MicroPress, Inc.
>sup...@micropress-inc.com (MicroPress, Inc.) writes:
>
>>>I've been browsing through the pdfTeX FAQ and some related
>>>references, and am left with one question: What are the
>>>advantages/disadvantages of pdfLaTeX compared with the
>>>combination of LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf?
>
>>One-pass processing is always advantageous: faster.
>
>Surely computers are so fast nowadays that this factor is irrelevant?
Computers are never sufficiently fast; never were, never will be.
But 1 pass approach also has other advantages: chances of errors
are much fewer and the results are usually better. For example, say
you have a .tex source which includes a couple of .eps' which use
cmr10. A multipass approach (say, eps->pdf, then include with
pdflatex) will result in 3 copies of cmr10. A one-pass approach like
vtex will produce only one copy.
Daniel Luecking
>ai...@rsc.anu.edu.au.invalid wrote:
>> macros/latex/contrib/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
>>
>> on your local CTAN archive. WAY neat I reckon.
>>
>You mean
> macros/latex/contrib/supported/pdfscreen/maria-1.pdf
>Way neat, indeed.
It does look very nice.
It is part of the pdfscreen package. Is there any chance of someone
making pdfscreen and D.P. Story's web.sty and exerquiz.sty work
together?
--
Dan Luecking Dept. of Mathematical Sciences
luec...@comp.uark.edu University of Arkansas
http://comp.uark.edu/~luecking/ Fayetteville, AR 72101
ai...@rsc.anu.edu.au.invalid
> PdfLaTeX (or, more properly, PdfTeX) does not have an integrated
> PS->PDF converter which would be required for PStricks or other
> inline PostScript. The only TeX->PDF compiler that does have it
> is VTeX (http://www.micropress-inc.com). Free versions of it are
> available for linux and os/2, see
> http://www.micropress-inc.com/linux
> http://www.micropress-inc.com/os2
> and a commercial exists for Windows.
It seems this is only available as an executable ... I assume for intel
architectures, is this correct?
Any chance you could get interested parties to compile this software
for other platforms, like SunOS?
*hint* *hint*
Seems a shame to have done the job of porting and then not have it
available to more people.
Cheerio
Aidan
Maia
>
> Personally, the advantage of pdfLaTeX for me is that it works
> while the alternative route does not.
> (I admit that this is almost certainly my fault.)
>
Strange, pdflatex doesn't work for me, acrobat reader 4.0 will simply
refuse to show some pdf color images I've included (no problem
with graphics or included pngs). On the other hand latex --> dvips -->
ps2pdf works well. Oh well, certainly my fault.
Timothy Murphy
>> Surely computers are so fast nowadays that this factor is irrelevant?
>Timothy, I want your computer!!!
On the contrary, I want your fingers.
To type in a page of LaTeX takes me say half-an-hour
(much more if I have to think about what I'm typing).
To run it through LaTeX takes about 1 second.
Does it really matter if it takes 2 seconds, or even 5?
I've always found these discussions of the speed (or lack or it)
of TeX/LaTeX bizarre.
It's a bit like worrying about how long it takes
to sharpen pencils when writing a novel.
David Carlisle
> To run it through LaTeX takes about 1 second.
> Does it really matter if it takes 2 seconds, or even 5?
No, but dvips+distiller might take rather more than 5 times as long.
I agree that when doing the original writing, speed of processing is
not really the issue, however previewing isn't much of an issue then
either. But when it comes to final drafts, or for making slides for a
presentation, when there is not much typing and a lot of visual
inspection, being able to preview the thing in a reasonable time does
make a lot of difference.
David