Re: pdf / ghostscript viewer

["Michael J. Mitchell" <mitch redback com au>]

Mark Hamstra wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
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Actually if you set gs with -DNOPLATFONTS (I think?) this should help.
Ghostscript will then avoid the uglier bitmap fonts supplied with the X
server.

If you want to install some decent fonts have a rummage through the gimp
site for URW. As far as I can remember these are quite decent.

								mitch