Re: pdf / ghostscript viewer

[Mark Hamstra <mark hamstra Bentley com>]

On Fri, 06 Feb 1998, Jim Pick wrote:
::
:> :The anti-aliasing in gv sucks compared to acroread (that's why it's
:> :not on by default, I guess)
:
:> ??  I have no idea what you are talking about.  I just fired up gv
:> to try to get some clue, but my experience is just the oposite of
:> yours: If I drop the zoom level down so that text is tiny and
:> illegible without antialiasing, turning on aliasing makes a huge
:> difference, making the text readable again.  At larger sizes, gv
:> produces absolutely beautiful text for me.
:
:I think it's a problem on my end.  Actually, I tried looking at a
:different document than what I was looking at before, and the
:antialiasing looks quite acceptable.  I bet it was a particular font
:in the document I was looking at originally.  I think that acroread
:has better handling for fonts that aren't installed on the system.

GIGO.  If you're starting with cruddy Type1 fonts, antialiasing won't magically
make them beautiful.  Acroread does ship with real Adobe definition files for
some standard fonts, and these are the fonts that Adobe's PDF tools will use by
default unless you explicitly specify something weird.  the end result, of
course, is that most PDF documents look just fine in Acroread.  If you were to
give Ghostscript access to these same font files, then the documents should look
every bit as good in gv as in Acroread.

Of course, you can go a little overboard with this installing of fonts business,
but with over 2,000 quality Type1 fonts on my system, I almost never find a 
document I can't display or print accurately with gv :-) 

 --
Mark Hamstra
Bentley Systems, Inc.