[pdftex] slightly OT: ps2pdf vs. distiller

[Peter Sojan]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 01:49:28PM +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
>
> maybe the differences in the font spec/descriptor (Ascent and CapHeight and 
> alike) determine how the font renderer optimizes the viewing (direction of 
> rounding, snapping, etc) or maybe some hinting mess-up
> 

Well, I'm not very familiar with the inner-workings of PS and PDF, but I 
know, that the font gets already embedded into the PostScript file. Hence,
both, ps2pdf and distiller, start from the same point (I guess the 
font spec/descriptor you mention is part of the font). Then if both use 
the same (embedded) font, why do they produce different output? I think
that Distiller tweaks some PDF-parameters so that the result looks 
sharper (see again the link on my web-page). However, I can't find any
such parameter in the PDF-docs nor in the Ghostscript manuals. Of course 
it could also be that Distiller takes the fonts embedded in the PS and 
optimizes them in one way or another before writing them back into the 
PDF, I just don't know. In the meantime I use distiller for my PS docs
(which I have only on Windows :-[), and pdf(e)tex for directly generating
PDF documents. Interestingly latter produces output in Distiller's quality 
(sharp font display). 

Peter