[texworks] Current status of Tw development

[David Perry]

This is slightly off topic, since we're talking about printing, but may 
be useful to know.

I've tried several different PDF viewers, both open source and 
commercial.  They are all accurate (as far as I have noticed; the issue 
Paul mentions with poppler putting in extra space has not happened to 
me) but the quality of the on-screen rendering varies. On my system 
PDF-XChange gives noticeably nicer type than does Adobe Reader, with 
Sumatra and FoxIt in between.  {Printed output is virtually identical on 
all of them.)  Adobe Reader is also slow and bloated, even though it is 
apparently the most widely used reader.  For these reasons I recommend 
just the "open in default PDF viewer" rather than any special treatment 
for Adobe Reader, as was suggested at one point.

Stefan asked how many people use Tw for professional typesetting.  I 
don't make my living doing typesetting, but I do produce documents that 
I want to be of professional quality to distribute on my website.  And I 
do know about kerning and stuff . . .

David

On 11/21/2010 6:32 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 18 nov. 2010 à 07:56, Paul A Norman a écrit :
>
>> P.s. regarding printing pdf  from preview - I should add that from
>> using TeXworks as a typesetter, and the proofing point of view, it is
>> extremely important to at some point to actually print out (and
>> preview), not from the poppler library Tw uses, but from pdf viewers
>> that are going to render the typeset material as your users will
>> likely see it and print it. And I understand that many assume Acrobat
>> Reader is still way up there in the numbers.
>
> Here I must admit I do not see your point. Are you saying that the poppler library, and xpdf on which it is based, do not render PDF code in an accurate way? And that there can be such thing as an inaccurate PDF interpreter?
>
> Adobe Reader/Acrobat is probably more complete than the other PDF interpreters out there, either the free xpdf, poppler and gs or the PDF Kit inside OS X, in that it can display more complex or less documented PDF constructs that the other PDF viewers can't.
>
> But other than that, all PDF interpreters are supposed to render PDF code accurately to screen, and to convert it to accurate PS code for printing. Or did I misunderstand something?
>
> Or maybe when you write "printing pdf from preview" you mean using a screenshot of the View window for printing?
>
> Bruno Voisin
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