Making beautiful PDFs on CAG machines:

Updated 2006-01-29

  1. I installed Adobe's distiller on cagfarm. Run
    distill filename.ps
    or
    distill -pd +IEEE-PDF-Acrobat4-11Nov05 filename.ps if you are submitting a paper and need full font embedding.
  2. pdflatex + ps2pdf13 works nicely. You can use epstopdf to convert eps graphics to PDF as required by pdflatex.
The following techniques are no longer necessary with our current distribution, and are here for posterity.

Quick (but potentially dirty):

  1. Place the following in your preamble to get Type 1 scalable fonts or PDF-builtins for most, but not all, fonts that appear in Latex documents.
      \usepackage{times}
      \usepackage{mathptm}
    
  2. Use the -Ppdf option to dvips. On my system appears to use the bluesky version of the CMR fonts. Beware of gibberish (such as the letters "fi" being replaced with the British "pound" symbol. Update! I think this goes away if you use -j0 and (undocumented?) -G0.
  3. Use dvipdfm instead of dvips. This is tricky to setup, but available in distros like Fedora.
  4. Invoke dvipdf instead of dvips. This relies on ghostscript to do the right thing. In my experience it doesn't actually work.
  5. (Only handles .pdf and tiff graphics?) no changes to .tex file, but use pdflatex (instead of latex). pdflatex is installed on cagfarm

The way that I like best

It's a bit complex, but requires the least changes to by ordinary flow (.ps and .eps handled directly). It lets the times and mathptm take care of most fonts, and uses BaKoMa Type 1 versions of the CMR fonts and symbols that sneak through.

Note. If you're in CAG, it may be easier to pull the PDF target from my Makefile rather than creating a .dvipsrc


1.  echo "p +/u/kbarr/projects/latex/bakoma.map" > ~/.dvipsrc

(The .pfb fonts referenced in this .map file are available here and at CTAN.) 2. create doc; run "latex" as usual 3. dvips -f -j0 < input.dvi > output.ps 4. create pdf - Linux : /u/kbarr/bin/i386-linux/ps2pdfwr input.ps output.pdf (ps2pdfwr is the ps2pdf that comes with Ghostscript 6.50+) - Sun : distill input.ps note: this methord creates a much larger .ps file, so you may want use the old empty ~/.dvipsrc to get an easier-to-download .ps file as well.

Misc

Matt Frank points out that you can get palatino, helvetica and courier in Type 1 (PDF-friendly) fonts. The times package gives you hv and cr, but use the palatino package for the pl roman font, if you prefer it.
\usepackage{palatino}           % rm font
\usepackage{helvet}             % sf font
\usepackage{courier}            % tt font