[OS X TeX] Missing characters in Preview w/CJK

[Roger Hart]

On Sep 24, 2004, at 12:17 AM, Issio wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am a little surprised by your unfortunate experience. Are you sure
> installation process went correctly till the end ?
>
> Could you please send me (off-list) one of your .tex file ? I'll try to
> process it with my installation and send you the resulting pdf file. 
> You can
> then check if your printer accept it or not.
>
> Regards,
>
> Olivier Delloye

Dear Olivier (and others on this list),

Forgive me for my delay in responding -- I was away from my email.  
First I want to express my most sincere gratitude for all of your help. 
  Without the considerable time you took to help me and others, without 
your most generous, detailed instructions, I never would have been able 
to get CJK working with TeX on OS X.  I would also like to acknowledge 
that Shunsaku Hirata offered me considerable help in setting up 
dvipdfmx on my computer.  I am enormously grateful and truly indebted 
for your generous assistance.

That being said, I also feel a responsibility to others on this list 
who, like me, have deadlines to meet, and are looking for the best 
program to complete their work.  In my humble opinion, they should not 
be using dvipdfmx, at least at this point.  I discovered this one day 
before a deadline.  I've appended part of the plea I had to make for an 
extension:

> Technical problems:  I run LaTeX on Mac OS X 10.3, and in mid-January I
> noticed that the PDF files generated by pdftex were not displaying
> Chinese characters properly. I first attempted to solve the problem
> using Adobe Acrobat Professional 6.0 and through Adobe Technical
> Support. When this failed, I spent a couple days installing and
> debugging dvipdfmx (an extension of dvipdfm which is supposed to handle
> Chinese fonts, but did not install properly on Mac OS X).  At the time
> I believed that dvipdfmx solved the problem. On the day I uploaded my
> files to NSF, I discovered that my dvipdfmx files did not print from
> our departmental Lexmark printer, so I reverted to pdftex. I called NSF
> technical support for LaTeX, but received only general advice.  I
> uploaded my pdftex files to the NSF server, and while they printed
> correctly, when the NSF server combined all the files, the Chinese
> characters were garbled. I then I tried to upload dvipdfmx files to the
> NSF server, but discovered that NSF considers dvipdfm (and hence
> dvipdfmx) unreliable and the NSF server would not accept the files. I
> then had to work around the clock for a couple of days to find a way to
> correct this problem. For reasons I do not understand I had
> considerable trouble getting mktexmf to process my Chinese fonts; but
> in the end I somehow solved the problem and was able to use
> TeX+Ghostscript to create bitmap fonts and PDF files acceptable to the
> NSF server.

So I hope you can understand why while I am sincerely and truly 
grateful for all your assistance, at the same time I want others to 
avoid this kind of problem with dvipdfmx.

Sincerely,

Roger

>
> le 22/09/04 23:37, Roger Hart a rhart at mail.utexas.edu a ecrit :
>
>> I am not a technical expert, but having spent many days trying to get
>> dvipdfmx to work properly, I would strongly discourage using it:
>>
>> 1) It was, for me at least, even with very considerable and most
>> generous assistance, difficult to install and get running properly.
>>
>> 2) More importantly, the resulting PDF was *not* better.  That is,
>> although the PDF files dvipdfmx produced did work properly under
>> Apple's Preview, they did not print properly from Adobe Acrobat on our
>> departmental Lexmark printer -- the printer simply dropped all the
>> pages after the first appearance of a Chinese character.
>>
>> 3) In fact, the National Science Foundation does not accept PDF output
>> from dvipdf or related programs because of the problems they have had
>> with them.
>>
>> I have returned to using pdftex, which seems to work on everything
>> except Apple's Preview.  I never was able to determine what the exact
>> problem was.  But TeXShop has a macro to view PDF output in Acrobat,
>> and I use that.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Roger
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 21, 2004, at 2:55 AM, issio at free.fr wrote:
>>
>>> This is a known bug with pdfTeX (check CJK Mailing List archive for
>>> detailed
>>> explanations). You should use "dvipdfmx" instead.
>>>
>> ********************************
>>
>> Roger Hart
>> Assistant Professor, Departments of History and Asian Studies
>> University of Texas at Austin
>>
>> email: rhart at mail.utexas.edu
>> http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rhart
>>
>> *********************************
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>
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>
>

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