[OS X TeX] Why is pdflatex not good enough?

[William F. Adams]

On Thursday, July 8, 2004, at 05:18  PM, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 09:25:10AM -0400, William F. Adams wrote:
>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2004, at 07:33  PM, Maarten Sneep wrote:
>>
>>> I don't know what these settings-files for Acrobat do, but if those
>>> settings can be used somehow, then we could just pretend that the 
>>> file
>>> was generated in the way they specified... Anyone around with better
>>> insight into this subject matter?
>>
>> The big problems with pdflatex from a publisher's viewpoint:
>>
>>  - font inclusion / non-standard fonts, esp. Type 3
>
> This can usually be fixed by generating mapfiles with updmap with
> the right settings in updmap.cfg. For print publishing, you should
> also include the base-14 (Times etc.).
>
> And don't forget that included graphics may bring their own font
> problems with them.

An excellent point.

>>  - missing some tables required for say PDF/X compliance (these can be
>> added)
>>  - placed .pdf graphics are ``form'' objects, which many older pdf
>> tools can't reach inside of to fix / examine
>>  - failure to set certain pre-press oriented settings such as 
>> overprint
>> for multi-colour jobs
>
> For overprinting, you can give my overprint.sty at
> http://tex.aanhet.net/overprint/ a try.  It seems to do what it is
> supposed to do, judging by Acrobat's separation preview, but for the
> project for which I wrote it I ended up submitting a preseparated
> pdf instead, on request of the printer.

I've been meaning to experiment with your code, and to send you a .pdf 
separated with PDF Output Pro....

>> Lesser problems include
>>
>>  - colour model (don't use RGB, and spots are hard to accommodate)
>
> Fortunately, not everybody insists on pdf/x or makes a fuss about
> rgb.
>
> For just black plus spotcolor, you can one of cyan/magenta/yellow
> stand for the spotcolor. Context has better spotcolor support.

Yes and yes. Unfortunately, the former work-around is falling out of 
favour somewhat as printers move more to CTP and workflows focused on 
soft-proofing (and are spoiled by Adobe InDesign's ability to alias one 
colour to another).

>> That said, a decent work-around for much of the above in Mac OS X is 
>> to
>> set up one's .pdf generation in Mac OS X to conform to PDF/X, open a
>> .pdf in Preview or TeXshop and print-save to a .pdf
>
> Do you have first-hand experience with re-saving pdftex-generated
> pdf with preview? One might worry that Preview might mangle a
> basically good if not quite pdf/x conforming pdftex-produced pdf.

Thus far I've always been able to make PostScript and Adobe Acrobat 
Distiller and PitStop do whatever I've needed done.

>> Here's a link which discusses this and the settings:
>>
>> http://www.creativepro.com/printerfriendly/story/21266.html
>>
>> (It's mostly correct)
>
> One thing which may not have been mentioned: the PostScript-to-pdf
> conversion of Preview is done by a command-line program pstopdf,
> which you can use directly if you want.

Hmm, that last is interesting. Is this a front-end to the ``Panther 
Distiller'' mentioned in the TeXshop Preferences?

>> That does introduce one other wrinkle:
>>
>>  - use of very new .pdf stuff (pdf version 1.4 or later)
>
> If you don't need the new pdf stuff, put a line
>
> \pdfoptionpdfminorversion=3
>
> in your preamble, just to be sure.

But that won't influence what Apple's Quartz PDF-generation creates, 
will it? (I meant that the .pdf created by the print-save using Quartz 
will introduce new .pdf stuff)

<snip>

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

-----------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>
Please see <http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/> for list
guidelines, information, and LaTeX/TeX resources.