From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 10 06:14:58 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 479A216A4B3 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 06:14:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from hauptpostamt.charite.de (hauptpostamt.charite.de [193.175.66.220]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E1D3743FA3 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 06:14:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from alexander.haderer@charite.de) Received: from postamt1.charite.de (postamt1.charite.de [193.175.66.246]) by hauptpostamt.charite.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7B49215C29E; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:12:30 +0200 (CEST) Received: from chaplin.charite.de (chaplin.str.charite.de [192.168.202.88]) by postamt1.charite.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 911EC6342B; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:12:30 +0200 (CEST) Message-Id: <5.2.0.9.1.20031010144022.01a7bd70@postamt1.charite.de> X-Sender: afrika@postamt1.charite.de X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.2.0.9 Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:06:23 +0200 To: William O'Higgins , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: Alexander Haderer In-Reply-To: <20031010123141.GA1925@sillyrabbi.dyndns.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at charite.de Subject: Re: writing pdfs X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 13:14:58 -0000 At 08:31 10.10.2003 -0400, William O'Higgins wrote: >I have grown tired of using MS Word as my standard document output >format. I haven't gotten OpenOffice to work under FreeBSD (and it isn't >my favourite tool by a long shot) and I am most happy generating text in >vi. PDF is eminently portable, and I think that it would suit my >purposes nicely. > >I had some thoughts about generating PDFs, but I was hoping for advice >about which tools to use. Should I just learn how to mark up a text >page manually (I write HTML almost as quickly as plain text)? I think no, because: - "modern" pdf uses compression - pdf has/may have a non linear contents: page one may be located somewhere in the pdf. - Expect pdf readers that behave strange when displaying odd pdf files >Should I >learn TeX or some variant and translate it? My opinion: yes. Learn the basics of LaTeX and use pdflatex instead of latex to create pdf files directly from your tex source. The "old" way of generating pdf via tex->dvi->ps->pdf via the classic (la)tex commands has the disadvantage that you have to deal with different ps-fontencodings (type 1 / type 3 or Pixelfont vs. Outline font) with the bad sideeffect that your pdfs have crippled and slow display on screen while printing works fine. google is full of messages regarding this topic. Advantages of (la)tex: the possibility to include images into your documents without problem and tables and footnotes and index and table of X and ... pdflatex is part of the (almost) complete tex distribution teTeX: /usr/ports/print/teTeX. This port has lots of documentation onboard. For more information about tex see: http://www.ctan.org/ If you think tex is much too fat for your needs because you only want to write some lines of text consider using groff (base system) with ps output and then convert this output to pdf via ps2pdf (part of /usr/ports/print/ghostscript-gnu-XXX) Alexander