Re: Problem with dvips and Acrobat

["Berthold K.P. Horn" <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 05:53 AM 98/12/05 +0000, you wrote:

>Obviously, in such cases, any moderately intelligent user would turn off
>any such fiddling when producing a PS file to be turned into a pdf file.

How?  DVIPS is designed from the ground up to refer everything to a
discrete grid.  The closest you can get to `turning it off' is to chose
some random large resolution.

>btw, what do you mean by `re-defining the fount metrics'?  Surely dvips
>simply allows character positions to drift slightly in individual cases,
>rather than re-defining the fount metrics?

It rounds the actual character advance widths to some discrete grid and
then replaces the true advance widths with the vector of coaresely quantized
values it has constructed.  Resluting in a PS file that is not truly
resolution-independent --- a file that is optimized for a specific resolution 
and that will print *worse* than if no adjustments had been made at a 
different resolution.  

One of the great features of PS is that it enables one to create 
resolution-independent output.  Grid fitting is a function that the
rasterizer should perform, not the application producing the PS.


Berthold K.P. Horn
Cambridge, MA		mailto:bkph@ai.mit.edu