Re: Problem with dvips and Acrobat

["Melissa O'Neill" <oneill@cs.sfu.ca>]

Rowland writes:
> 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.
> 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?

No, dvips really does redefine the font metrics. DVIPS likes to think
of fonts like they're bitmaps, and bitmaps have a width that is an
integral number of device pixels (at least on the device they were
rendered for).  DVIPS makes its PS fonts `just like' bitmap fonts by
rounding the metrics to what they'd be if the font was a bitmap font
for the intended printer.

This rounding behaviour is one of the key reasons why DVIPS reads TFM
files -- it needs to know the font metrics so it can meddle with them
and thereby turn a beautiful device independent font into a device
dependent thing.

About the only way around this problem is to tell DVIPS that you have
a 2400dpi printer or somesuch so that the roundoff errors (1/4800th of
a point) are unlikely to add up to much.

Berthold's DVIPSONE does a better job, but it isn't open source software,
so I'll keep on using DVIPS.  Maybe someday someone will become impassioned
enough about such minutiae to fix DVIPS.

    Melissa.