[tex-k] dvips -G1 bugfix: testing needed

M. Shell mshell@ece.gatech.edu
Fri, 12 Apr 2002 20:09:42 -0400


Thomas Esser wrote:

> Tomas Rokicki just has finished an important bugfix concerning the
> character shifting feature of dvips.

OK,

I tested it with my soon-to-be-released testflow diagnostic page
(an alpha release without docs can be obtained at:
 http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mshell/)

and am pleased to report that it works great.

I never considered the G1 problem to be a bug - I always viewed
it as an error in a user's configuration. Since Acrobat Readers
4.0 and later don't need G1, what is the official policy now on the
use of G1? i.e., should they or should they not? The answer to
this may depend on what we think Adobe may do in future versions
of Acrobat Reader. (And good luck getting them to a TUG meeting.)

Whichever way we go, we should aim to bury this issue once and for all.


In a related question, what is the current opinion of Zandt's
alt-rule.pro? (http://zandtwerk.insead.fr/tex2pdf.html)

Drawing lines by stroke rather than by fill does greatly improve
their appearance in my testflow page. I noticed no ill effects
even when creating rules over a 100pt thick. But, why hasn't
this been integrated into tex.pro or at least carried in an
alt-rule.pro in the tetex releases? Is there a dark side to it?
pdflatex does produce rules of quality equal to those made with
alt-rule.pro.


 Thanks,

 Mike Shell
 mshell@ece.gatech.edu