[OS X TeX] 10.4.7, dvipdf, Preview, and mangled math

[overdog.ldn at gmail.com]

Hello,

I have searched online for this problem but find no reference to it.  
I am sorry for the long message, but I am hoping to get some useful  
advice.

My TeX installation is teTeX via fink, which must have been updated  
last around the time of the original 10.4 release, probably compiled  
from source. I recently upgraded to 10.4.7, but have no idea whether  
that's to blame for a problem I recently started experiencing,  
although, as far as I know it always worked OK under 10.4.6 and never  
under 10.4.7.

The particular problem is that many of my math expressions appear  
mangled in Preview, with several glyphs missing, or replaced by  
square boxes with either various shades or weird phonetic characters  
in them. I'm not doing very much special beyond straightahead math  
typesetting. The problem seems to be largely confined to non-numeric  
super-/subscripts. I don't see this problem in Acrobat reader, but my  
document is quite long (>100 pages) and I can't currently say whether  
other weirdness is resulting.

I build pdfs from a dvi output by LaTeX using dvi2pdf. I have also  
tried generating postscript from the dvi using dvips, and using  
Apple's pstopdf, but the problem I describe below persists. As far as  
I know, I am only using built-in default LaTeX fonts. I haven't tried  
anything fancy like using Mac fonts or anything like that.

I suppose it is possible that Preview has broken, but other documents  
compiled before this started happening still display fine. So my  
guess is that its something to do with the PDF generation. Also I  
think things look okay in xdvi when I look at the dvi file.

I don't understand what has broken, and am reluctant to presently  
attempt a major overhaul of my LaTeX environment since I need this  
document to print faithfully within the next day or two. Fortunately  
my printshop uses Acrobat reader under XP, so the problem is one of  
just being sure that nothing is seriously broken when I ask for many  
copies of my document to be made.

Is there anything straightforward I can do to repair whatever is  
broken? I probably need step-by-step instructions if it involves  
uncommon operations. Can I rely on these PDFs in the sense of Acrobat  
Reader printing them "accurately?"

Thanks for any assistance.

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