[OS X TeX] Newbie install and font question

[Enrico Franconi]

On March 21, Gerben Wierda writes:
> Agreed. There is a lot of PostScript trickery available. pdfTeX is
> still catching up.

My impression is that it will be hard to catch up all the pstricks
derivatives. They are all based on the fact that postscript *IS* a
full blown programming language, and this is heavily used to generate
the special effects. Probably in the future will will have something
equivalent in native pdf, but now I can not live without my pstricks
derivatives. By the way, most of the tricks described in the Graphics
Companion book can not be currently done in pdftex.

So the problem is not whether it is good or not to translate first
your images into pdf or ps, but whether I can generate postscript
programs on the fly from tex -- which is what pstricks and friends do.

> Personally, I think it is not PostScript output per se, but DVI
> rastered to perfection for your resolution that is why normal TeX is
> still the best for actual printed material. 

Correct.

> And their preferred output is PDF, not PS which many people normally
> cannot dispay or print, or which has to be compressed a lot before
> you can safely send it. I can write my letters and articles in TeX,
> produce PDF and send them to any windows user and more or less rely
> on the fact that their system will have a PDF viewer on board. With
> ps and dvi this is not the case.

Completely agree. But what's the problem with "dvips -Pdf | ps2pdf"?
In this way you have all your native pstricks macros available and you
generate the portable, compact PDF you want to distribute.

cheers
-- e.

Enrico Franconi                     - franconi at cs.man.ac.uk
University of Manchester            - http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~franconi/
Department of Computer Science      - Phone: +44 (161) 275 6170
Manchester M13 9PL, UK              - Fax:   +44 (161) 275 6204

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