writing pdfs

[Alexander Haderer]

At 07:59 10.10.2003 -0600, Tillman Hodgson wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 03:06:23PM +0200, Alexander Haderer wrote:
> > 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.
>
>I agree with the recommendation to learn LaTeX. It's probably the best
>way to generate PDF output and it's widely used for document generation.
>
>I disagree that one needs to use pdflatex, though. Those side-effects
>you mention are trivial to get rid of:

>  1. \usepackage{times}      (or palatino or bookman or whatever font
>                              package you like)

Does this work without _any_ problems when you want to use the 
(tex-default) computer modern fonts? My experiences over the last years 
with different platforms and latex installations are, that you alway have 
to "google"-around to get this working. I use LaTeX/pdf output only from 
time to time so I am not the big expert, but using pdflatex a while ago was 
the first time I got the CMR fonts into a pdf without any display/print 
problems. I just made some slight modifications to my latex file necessary 
for pdflatex (mentioned in the pdflatex doc) and whoops, there it was.

Alexander