3.2.4
Preparing a PDF Document, Edward Fox, Susanne Dobratz
A popular
page representation scheme, a published de facto standard developed by Adobe is
the Portable Document Format, PDF. Adobe provides the Acrobat Reader free of
charge (and promised it into the foreseeable future), which will read current
as well as previous versions of PDF. It is downloadable at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html. Adobe also provides tools for
creating, annotating, and manipulating PDF documents, through its own word
processing software, printer drivers, and distilling from PostScript. The whole
suite is called Adobe Acrobat and is actually available with version 5. Adobe’s
Acrobat software, installed on a Windows or Macintosh platform allows most
suitable documents to be converted to PDF in moments. From word processors such
as Word, WordPerfect, and Framemaker, each document portion can be “printed” to
the Distiller printer driver, yielding a PDF file. The Distiller converts
PostScript files to PDF files. Acrobat software allows multiple PDF files to be
assembled into larger PDF files by inserting documents or deleting pages in an
existing PDF file.
It is
also possible to produce PDF documents on UNIX systems. However, the latest
version of Acrobat Distiller that was available for certain UNIX platforms such
as Solaris or HP-UX was version 3.1.
Authors writing in LaTeX can use ghostscript to produce PDF files. But in order
to obtain readable PDF documents, issues of used fonts, used conversion scripts,
etc. have to be considered.
To avoid
problems for future readers, authors should embed all fonts in their documents
(when that is allowed). Otherwise, software displaying or printing PDF content
will attempt to find a similar font and extrapolate from it, which may cause
serious problems.
Similarly,
authors should use so-called “outline” fonts as opposed to bitmap fonts, so
that display and printing can proceed to scale characters as required. Thus,
when using
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Acrobat
(http://www.adobe.com)
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Ghostscript
(http://archiv.leo.org/pub/comp/general/typesetting/tex/support/ghostscript/ or http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost) and Viewer Tool ghostview (http://archiv.leo.org/pub/comp/general/typesetting/tex/support/ghostscript/gnu/ghostview/)
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NikNak (http://www.niknak.de/is/5dorder.htm)
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XPDF (http://www.footlabs.com/xpdf)
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Magellan/ Drake (http://bcl-computers.com)
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Gemini (http://www.iceni.com)
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Omnipage (http://www.scansoft.com)