[OS X TeX] strangeness with PDFKit or TeX?

[Gary L. Gray]

I have started labeling figures by creating the labels in LaTeX  
(using pdflatex), converting the fonts in the resulting PDF to  
outlines using the AppleScript I recently posted (which is based on a  
gs command), placing the labels in the Adobe Illustrator (AI) figure,  
saving the figure as a PDF, and then cropping the figure using yet  
another AppleScript I have created (based on the pdfcrop perl  
script). With this in mind, I noticed something odd yesterday: if I  
look at a page in either TeXShop or Preview that contains a figure  
that has been created in this manner, then all of the text on that  
page is not anti-aliased well, that is, it looks a little jagged. On  
pages containing figures that have been labeled using WARMreader (via  
WARMFigToPDF) the text all looks great. You can see this in the  
following PDF (at all magnifications):

http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/misc/Anti-Alias-PDFKit-issue.pdf

The first page is the one with the somewhat jagged fonts (that  
contains the figure labeled in the manner described above) and the  
second page is the one with the nice looking fonts.

By the way, both pages look about the same when opened in Acrobat  
(which means, of course, that they look bad since Acrobat pretty much  
sucks -- but I digress).

Why would this be happening? The "fonts" that are included as labels  
on the first page are simply outlines in AI (and therefore are only  
AI paths/objects), so why would their inclusion in a figure change  
the look of the entire page? Is this a bug in PDFKit or is something  
going on in the way TeX builds the page?

Thank you.

-- Gary
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