TeX -or- LaTeX generated pdf files with many problems

[Rivka]

On the internet there are lots of papers by professors on their sites.

From the font and layout its clear that they were produced from TeX -
or- LaTeX sources and not say, Microsoft Word.

These files probably were also produced using acrobat distiller
from .ps version.

The newer files are being produced by pdflatex and dont seem to have
problem.

Some of the problems are :

A. The cursor is as huge as the whole page so that if you select, it
selects the whole page.

B. When the problem A is not there, other problem is that the files
are not searcheable, selecting a part of the text produces control
characters.

C. The fonts are not bitmapped but dim as compared to the newly
generated files.

Questions are :

1. Are there any windows based commercial programs that can fix some
of these problems ?

2. Are there any diagnostic commands in linux that can allow finding
out the problems ? Like the type of fonts ?

pdftotext
pdffonts
pdftoascii
parse a PDF document (wrapper script for htdig)
pdftk

Thanks.

[Robert]

At Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:33:04 -0700 (PDT) Rivka Miller <com> wrote:
 

Note: Since acrobat distiller is *only* available under MS-Windows or
MacOS, and PDF created from TeX or LaTeX *under* Linux (or any version
of UNIX) NOT created with pdf(la)tex, would have been created by
ghostscript.
 

I just converted a file created via LaTeX -> .dvi -> dvips .ps -> ps2pdf
-> .pdf and had NONE of these problems. ps2pdf is a script that is part
of ghostscript. This was done under Linux (CentOS 5.5, x86_64), using:

tetex-latex-3.0-33.8.el5_5.5
tetex-dvips-3.0-33.8.el5_5.5
ghostscript-8.15.2-9.11.el5
xpdf-3.02-15.el5

 

--
Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software -- Download the Model Railroad System
http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows
com -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/