xdvi's overstrikes

[Matthew Swift <swift@bu.edu>]

By lots of experimenting, I've concluded that the best way to get a
good-looking gif for the web from some PostScript fonts is to render
them with xdvi (ricoh mode) and do a screen grab with xv.  This leaves
you with a good looking, relatively compact gif in about 10-15 shades
of grey.

The snag for me now is getting xdvi to cope with overstriking
characters.  I'm using version 18f and XFree86 3.1.1 (Debian Linux).
I use the -thorough option, but it doesn't seem to make any
difference.   I get the message "overstrike characters
may be incorrect" when using -thorough but not with -copy.

Is there a workaround that comes to mind?

I don't have Photoshop or Illustrator or other fancy software, but I
have Adobe Type Manager, and I could try the same screen-grab trick
>From MS Word if I can find a screen-grabber.  But I would love to
solve it in Unix.


Thanks

Matt


PS with these images you can't make the background transparent,
however; it's exactly the fuzzy edge trailing into the background that
makes the image look so very much better than any conversion with
ghostscript at the head (e.g., ps --> ppm/pgm ).