[OS X TeX] XeLaTeX in Acrobat

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 4 mars 08 à 15:37, François Chaplais a écrit :

> It prints fine on the two printers I have used, preview is beautiful  
> both in TeXShop and Preview, but the preview in Acrobat for windows  
> (both versions 6 and 8) is awful at screen sizes, although at great  
> magnifications is is OK (but I mean the documents to be read on the  
> screen).
> I have output PS to pass them to my son who has distiller CS3, and  
> the result is the same in Acrobat Pro for the Mac.
> The issue is that the baseline and other metrics are not handled  
> properly by Acrobat at small sizes.
> Aren't here hints in truetype fonts? Or is is it just that Adobe  
> despises TT? Do I have to stick to Postscript fonts?

Adobe Reader and Acrobat use their own PDF rendering engine, which is  
different from the built-in OS X rendering engine used by other  
applications (Preview, TeXShop, ...). What you see is a manifestation  
of that.

I tried with your test file and the two XDVI-to-PDF drivers XeLaTeX  
can use: the default (for now) xdv2pdf and the alternative (for now)  
xdvipdfmx. Both embed the fonts (Cochin and Zapfino) properly, thus  
there's no problem there. It really just comes down to how Adobe  
applications render PDF, namely to how they use font hints to draw on  
screen.

Remember that Adobe applications for the Mac are essentially second- 
thought hasty Mac ports of Windows applications, though that probably  
isn't the only cause for the problem, given you experience the same  
rendering issues with Acrobat on Windows.

Here are screenshots on what I see with Acrobat and Preview (on  
Leopard 10.5.2):

http://homepage.mac.com/bvoisin/.cv/bvoisin/Sites/.Public/Acrobat.png-zip.zip
http://homepage.mac.com/bvoisin/.cv/bvoisin/Sites/.Public/Preview.png-zip.zip

Acrobat output isn't that bad: the vertical alignment of characters in  
the "Introduction" title is admittedly not as nice as that with  
Preview, but that's probably just the result of the rendering choices  
hardwired within Acrobat.

Bruno Voisin