[pdftex] pdftex versus dvips

[Jörg Ebeling]

Christoph Schiller wrote:

> Since a number of years, I have been putting a large pdf produced with 
> Latex
> on the web for free download ( a 1200 page physics textbook,
> available at http://www.motionmountain.net ).
>
> I have always typeset it with dvips, not with pdflatex, for several 
> reasons:
>
> - the pdf (at present 40 MB...) is considerably smaller when produced 
> with
> dvips and Acrobat distiller;
> ...

I developed a "Database driven Catalogue processing Engine" for a 
customer and in the beginning of the development (now it's more than 5 
years ago), I also required to decide for either dvips, pdflatex and the 
like.

Big Companies don't like non- Win~1 programs. They even don't like Linux 
or any other kind of GPLed stuff ... stop ... sorry, I'm drifting away...

Back to the topic.
Now they're able to produce a big bunch of Catalogue- PDF variations 
(Online, CD and Highres- Print versions) in size from 20 to about 600 MByte.
I finally got everything working with pdflatex (and with the help of a 
looot additional LaTeX packages) and I'm sure that our decision towards 
pdflatex was the right one for us.
Now after years of usage I'm still surprised about what's possible with 
these great 'pdflatex' stuff (and of course LaTeX, TeX and the macro 
packages itself too).

pdflatex is the real "workhorse" for us/them. Easy, precise and absolute 
reliable !


You may take a look to one of their Catalogues (this version is about 
20MByte ;-) ):
    ftp://ftp.shbe.org/jebeling/LjusKatalog_20050221_SE.pdf


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Jörg