[OS X TeX] Using Acrobat Distiller instead of pstopdf

[Timothy Van Zandt]

Hello! I don't participate much in this forum, but I enjoy browsing and 
would like to give a huge THANKS to those behind I-Installer and 
TeXShop, making Mac OS X the premier platform for using TeX, the way 
NextStep/Openstep once was (sniff).

Now probably no one else cares about using Acro Distiller instead of 
pstopdf or ps2pdf with TeXshop, or anyone who does care long ago figure 
it out. But here I give a simple solution. (A year ago I tried briefly 
to do this and even posted a few questions, but was unsuccessful.)

[Why do I want to use Acro Distiller? I want the tex-dvips-pstopdf route 
because I still use a lot of eps files and pstricks stuff and am too 
lazy to make all this compatible with pdflatex. I prefer Distiller 
because it creates smaller files (often 40% smaller when selecting 
compatibility with Acro 5.0) and embeds all fonts (whereas, for example, 
  pstopdf does not embed Times-Roman, which can cause problems with the 
euro glyph).]

The first thing is to create a command-line version of distiller. This 
requires an AppleScript to invoke Distiller and a sh script to invoke 
the AppleScript. For example, here is an AppleScript that takes one 
argument, which is the name of the PostScript file, with full path and 
".ps" extension.

------------
on run argv
	tell application "Acrobat Distiller 6.0.2"
		Distill sourcePath item 1 of argv
	end tell
end run
------------

It will just use the default Distiller settings. Other options can be 
found at
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/sdk/pdf/pdf_creation_apis_and_specs/DistillerAPIReference.pdf 


Here is a simple sh command that invokes it (assuming that the 
applescript is /tvz/bin/dodist.scpt), taking the same argument and 
passing it to the AppleScript:


-------------
#! /bin/sh

osascript /tvz/bin/dist.scpt $1
-----------------


I was too lazy to write my own "personal script" for TeXShop. So instead 
I pretend with TeXShop that I am using ghostscript and I copy my sh 
script to /usr/local/bin/ps2pdf13, which, for me at least, ends up 
getting invoked by TeXShop. (This last part is clearly a hack and I'm 
not sure it would always work.)


tim van zandt

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