[pdftex] Re: [tex-live] Question about importing images into TeX/LaTeX documents...

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Giuseppe Greco <giuseppe.greco at bluewin.ch> writes on
02 Jan 2003 23:48:26 +0100:

>> the quality of the PDF output is really poor!

Yes.  This is a well-known problem: for a discussion and visual
comparison, see

	http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/outline-vs-bitmap-fonts.html

The fix is fortunately easy, but depends on your local TeX DVI driver
configuration: essentially, you need to get the DVI driver to use
outline, rather than bitmap, fonts.

On Giuseppe's problem of maintaining both .eps and .png files for use
with TeX and PDFTeX, why not use make to keep them in sync, with the
(presumably resolution-independent) PostScript figure file as the
master from which the bitmap PNG file is generated.

Even better, avoid using bitmap figures when better alternatives are
available: here is an example (golfer.ps is widely available, and
included in ghostscript distributions and installations: it is also on
the TeXLive 7 CD as texmf/doc/latex/overpic/golfer.ps.gz):

% distill golfer.ps 	# make golfer.pdf (could use ps2pdf if distill is not available)

% cat pdf.ltx
\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}

\begin{document}

This is a PDF figure:

\centerline{\includegraphics[clip=true,scale=0.1]{golfer.pdf}}

\centerline{\includegraphics[clip=true,scale=0.2]{golfer.pdf}}

\centerline{\includegraphics[clip=true,scale=0.4]{golfer.pdf}}

\end{document}

% pdflatex pdf.ltx

This produces pdf.pdf with three images of increasing size, and the
images retain their quality even under gv's maximum 64x magnification.

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