Minus signs don't print - problem solved

[William R. Smith]

Hello,

 I responded briefly to this earlier post, part of which is appended 
below.   I am also a math prof, and  I use PDFTeX to post 
assignments, etc. for my students - see 
http://www.mathstat.uoguelph.ca/courses/offerings/math227/

 Although a "workaround" involving changing the printer's graphics 
settings is possible in some cases (see an earlier post of mine from 
another site), the _ultimate solution_ has now been found. One of my 
2nd year Engineering Systems and Computing students (G. Knap) 
put his finger on it last week. The problem's origins are due to the 
"letter-size vs A4-size problem", which plagues many North American 
users.  The discovery was that if, on loading the document in Acrobat 
Reader, it indicates a page size (as displayed in the lower right 
portion of a tool-bar at the bottom of the Acrobat reader screen) 
indicates a page size of 8.5 x 11 in, then the document will print 
with no problems.  However, if the page size shows as the A4 size 
(8.26 x 11.69 in), then the minus signs will NOT print on some 
printers (the HP LJ family being one type) - this is even tho the 
minus signs _display_ properly on the screen.

The solution then, is to make sure your PDFTeX  configuration 
produces letter-size documents. The ultimate check for this is the 
page-size indicator when Acrobat loads the document.  Your PDFTeX 
preamble must be set appropriately, and I have found that the 
following works with my configuration (I use the standard MikTeX 
installation obtained from CTAN):

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\pdfcompresslevel=9 \pdfoutput=1
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\usepackage[pdftex]{hyperref}
\begin{document}

You must also change the appropriate page-size option in the dvips 
configuration file (I think this is also required, but this is the 
case with my configuration).  I have done this by manually editing 
the DOS file  "config.ps" that comes with MikTeX editor (that 
which I use).    

I'd appreciate it if the original poster of the question would try 
this and confirm that it works.  From others on the list, can you 
tell me if there is a way to set the page-size from _within_ the 
LaTeX source file itself?  Or is there a way that Acrobat Exchange 
can change the page size itself?



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>I wrote the list here some time ago because my colleagues >and I in 
the math department were experiencing the difficulty >that minus 
signs do not print when a document is sent to the >HP postscript 
printer.  They do show up on  the acrobat reader >screen.  
>
>Somebody wrote back that we might be using the wrong fonts, but
>we did not do anything special.  The problem is serious, because
>we obviously cannot use pdftex to post assignments to our web
>pages if they cannot be used by students in a completely simple
>manner  to print the correct information.  
>
>The whole point of using pdftex from our point of view is  so
>that students would be able to print from our web pages without
>using a postscript viewer, which most of  the students don't
>have access to.  But if it can not handle the printing of the
>most simple things, it does not meet the needs of the mathematics
>community.