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

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 09:06:49PM -0400, William F. Adams wrote:
> On Thursday, July 8, 2004, at 05:18  PM, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:
> >
> >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 would be too bad. Maybe that is where this preference for
preseparated spot color comes from?
> 
> >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 looks like a reasonable guess, but, not being a TeXshop user, I
can't tell for sure.

> >>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)

Adobe Reader would be able to tell you the resulting pdf version. If
you want to look into the resulting pdf for more detail then you can
use the multivalent tools to make it human-readable.

I have read bad things about the Quartz save-as-pdf, although
pstopdf, and the preview frontend to it, seem to be ok. See e.g.
http://www.pdfzone.com/news/693-PDFzone_news.html and
http://www.prepressforums.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=234

Personally, I either use pdftex output as-is or otherwise go the
PostScript-Distiller route.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg
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