[pdftex] Pale print with Adobe Reader

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "George" == George N White <gnwiii at gmail.com> writes:

  > On 3/24/07, Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
  >> There is absolutely no need to upgrade unless you need new
  >> features.
  >> 
  >> Martin, I'm aware that you are involved in pdfTeX development and
  >> that no developer is interested in bug reports concerning ancient
  >> versions.  But in this particular case I do not see that
  >> upgrading provides any advantage.

  > It is true that, for any individual, it TeX is working there is
  > usually no immediate benefit from upgrading.  From the standpoint
  > of the community, however, encouraging everyone to use current
  > versions has long-term advantages:

Yes, but you never know how experienced people are.  For experienced
users it should not be a problem, but without much experience people
can also run into trouble.  Many people use TeX occasionally and it is
painful for them to update unless that will fix the problem. 

I formerly maintained a lot of programs myself on my old machine but
it was too much work.  Thus I switched from Slackware to Gentoo
because the latter allows incremental updates.  I'll not install the
latest version of any program to /usr/local unless I'm sure it's
necessary.  Otherwise I would mess up as with Slackware.

However, using recent versions is very helpful for finding bugs.  Thus
I hope that many people are using the latest release, but I do not
recommend *everyone* to update.  It depends on the skills of the
particular user.

It seems entirely wrong to me to ask people to upgrade their TeX
installation when they only need a replacement for Computer Modern.

  >> Coming back to the original question, does \usepackage{mathpazo}
  >> help?

  > The O.P. was using plain tex, so the answer is no.  With TL2007,
  > xetex is the easiest tool to support other fonts for a plain tex
  > source document (with the caveat that maths fonts would be a
  > problem -- I don't know if the O.P. needs extensive math, but
  > perhaps not since the CM fonts looked odd to him).

The reason I suggested mathpazo is to find out whether this font
gives better results and a small LaTeX test file could provide an
answer.  Another solution is to look at the VnTeX font samples.
I updated

  http://vntex.org/fonts/samples

a few hours ago.  This is helpful to find out which font family
provides best results.  The *-test.pdf files are relatively small and
can be sent to a printer.  The tfm files mentioned there are for
Vietnamese but if we know which fonts are of interest we can probably
provide more help.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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