[OS X TeX] Re: 10.4.7, dvipdf, Preview, and mangled math

[overdog.ldn at gmail.com]

Hello list,

I should withdraw my question, below. I have just done what I said I  
didn't want to do --- install another teTeX package (Gerben Wierda's  
package, in this case) --- and the problem seems to have gone away  
after a cursory glance. Along the way I have also rebooted my  
computer (I don't often do that).

Interestingly, the build of my document now seems to work properly no  
matter which package I use (the fink package or the newly installed  
one).

Perhaps it was something that sorted itself out on rebooting, but I  
rather wish I had tried that a couple of days ago. Perhaps Preview  
relies on something that's loaded at boot-time and became corrupted?  
Scary. I tried quitting and re-starting Preview a number of times  
before embarking on this latest attempt to fix things.

Anyway it seems like one way or another I will be able to get a  
useable PDF out of at least one, and probably both, of my latex  
installs.

Many thanks to the very kind people who offered assistance both on-  
and off-list.

On 23 Jul 2006, at 23:42, overdog.ldn at gmail.com wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have searched online for this problem but find no reference to  
> it. I am sorry for the long message, but I am hoping to get some  
> useful advice.
>
> My TeX installation is teTeX via fink, which must have been updated  
> last around the time of the original 10.4 release, probably  
> compiled from source. I recently upgraded to 10.4.7, but have no  
> idea whether that's to blame for a problem I recently started  
> experiencing, although, as far as I know it always worked OK under  
> 10.4.6 and never under 10.4.7.
>
> The particular problem is that many of my math expressions appear  
> mangled in Preview, with several glyphs missing, or replaced by  
> square boxes with either various shades or weird phonetic  
> characters in them. I'm not doing very much special beyond  
> straightahead math typesetting. The problem seems to be largely  
> confined to non-numeric super-/subscripts. I don't see this problem  
> in Acrobat reader, but my document is quite long (>100 pages) and I  
> can't currently say whether other weirdness is resulting.
>
> I build pdfs from a dvi output by LaTeX using dvi2pdf. I have also  
> tried generating postscript from the dvi using dvips, and using  
> Apple's pstopdf, but the problem I describe below persists. As far  
> as I know, I am only using built-in default LaTeX fonts. I haven't  
> tried anything fancy like using Mac fonts or anything like that.
>
> I suppose it is possible that Preview has broken, but other  
> documents compiled before this started happening still display  
> fine. So my guess is that its something to do with the PDF  
> generation. Also I think things look okay in xdvi when I look at  
> the dvi file.
>
> I don't understand what has broken, and am reluctant to presently  
> attempt a major overhaul of my LaTeX environment since I need this  
> document to print faithfully within the next day or two.  
> Fortunately my printshop uses Acrobat reader under XP, so the  
> problem is one of just being sure that nothing is seriously broken  
> when I ask for many copies of my document to be made.
>
> Is there anything straightforward I can do to repair whatever is  
> broken? I probably need step-by-step instructions if it involves  
> uncommon operations. Can I rely on these PDFs in the sense of  
> Acrobat Reader printing them "accurately?"
>
> Thanks for any assistance.
>

------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/