Good Looking PDF files from TeX

PDF files are my current favorite way of putting mathematics on the web. Adobe gives away acroread for almost every platform and there are other free pdf readers too (xpdf ghostscript). [The following assumes one is on one of the department Suns.] Unfortunately the standard path from tex to pdf file:

• tex foo.tex (or latex foo.tex) produces foo.dvi
• dvips foo.dvi (or lpr -d foo.dvi) produces foo.ps (lpr sends the file to the printer too)
• distill foo.ps produces foo.pdf

Here are two solutions:

• pdflatex, this is a standard TeX, LaTeX command these days and it directly converts foo.tex to foo.pdf. The only problem with pdflatex is that in does not handle figures included using postscript or encapsulated postscript files. Otherwise it is great.
• dvi2pdf, this is a shell script which is locally written. It converts foo.dvi to foo.pdf (overwriting and removing foo.ps) with the combined calls to dvips and distill. There are parameters to the dvips call which prevents it from generating the awful bitmap fonts it normally generates for the Computer Modern fonts. The program dvi2pdf does handle embedded postscript, encapsulated and not.

Steven Bellenot, 5 October 1999