[OS X TeX] Adobe Acrobat and printing

Richard Seguin riseguin at earthlink.net
Sat Oct 29 04:18:52 CEST 2005


Bruno's message about Adobe Acrobat has prompted me to make another  
comment about Acrobat. I've recently noticed that Acrobat isn't  
printing documents in the correct dimensions, while Preview and  
TeXShop do print them correctly. Line length, line spacing, and even  
the type itself, seems to be diminished from the correct dimensions  
by a small amount, but enough to make a significant visual difference  
on the page. If I specify, for example, a 6.5 inch line length, I'm  
actually getting approximately 6.1 inches when I print from Acrobat  
Reader. If I go to "Page Setup ..." and change "Format For" from  
Automatic to my specific printer, it improves slightly giving me a  
line length of 6.25 inches. Printing from Preview and TeXShop gives  
me the correct line length. I'm using an old LaserWriter 4/600 PS, a  
postscript printer. I would have thought that Adobe,  the developers  
of the closely related Postscript and PDF file formats, would  
certainly get this correct if anyone did. This problem does not seem  
to be related to the LaserWriter print driver either, because I've  
gotten the identical shrunken results printing a pdflatex document  
from Acrobat on a Windows machine to a non-postscript HP laser printer.

This raises an uncomfortable situation in designing your document. Do  
you adjust it to be printed correctly from Preview or other viewers,  
or to be printed from the most common viewer, Acrobat?

Richard Séguin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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