[OS X TeX] TeXShop doesn't open dvi-files

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 20 oct. 05 à 20:47, Maarten Sneep a écrit :

>> Now according to your reply, it
>> seems that we can change in the above preference option from
>> "Ghostscript" to "Apple Distiller"? Is this interpretation correct?
>> What's the benefits of doing this?
>
> No additional package to install, the Apple Installer is actually  
> the Adobe distiller,
> and _supposedly_ generates superior quality pdf. It is also a bit  
> slower in my
> experience. It will also include fonts that are available to the  
> GUI, meaning that
> it will find different fonts, and depending on how you generate a  
> certain figure,
> ghostscript may be able to convert a figure that the Apple  
> distiller can't and vice
> versa.

My experience as well (Apple's distiller pstopdf required for certain  
figures, and GhostScript's distiller ps2pdf required for others).

There's another difference too: it seems the GS distiller produces  
compressed PDF files, while the Apple distiller produces uncompressed  
files (judging by the file sizes). Thus, when pdfTeX or XeTeX  
processes a (La)TeX file including PDF figures, the processing will  
take much longer time if you used the Apple distiller, because it  
will include a compression step (invisible to the user) just before  
the final PDF file is produced. (This, because pdfTeX or XeTeX  
attempt by default to create compressed PDF output, and will perform  
the compression themselves in case the included PDF files are  
uncompressed.)

For example, I wrote recently a paper including big PDF figures for a  
total of several hundred megabytes (uncompressed). The final PDF  
output (compressed) of pdfTeX or XeTeX for the paper was about 80 MB.  
If I used the PDF figures produced by the GS distiller, processing  
the LaTeX input file took a couple of minutes at most. If I used the  
PDF figures produced by the Apple distiller, processing the same  
LaTeX input file took between 10 and 20 minutes, because of this  
additional compression step; and compression was repeated, moreover,  
at each typeset of the paper, whereas with the GS distiller it had  
been done once and for good.

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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