[KLUG Members] Re: StarOffice to PDF -- Actually, Windows' Postscript engine is the problem

[Bryan-TheBS-Smith]

John Bridleman wrote:
> We still have a long way to go regarding pdf files.

Bryan-TheBS-Smith wrote:
> No, I think you are continuing to miss my point.  You are rastering
> Postscript and then converting to PDF.  If you "skip the middleman," you
> get much more efficient conversion.

Let's even discuss this further.  What is Adobe Distiller?

It is, essentially, a print driver for Windows.  It takes the meta-print
data from the Windows print system, before it is rastered in the native
printer langauge and bloated bitmaps, and converts it into optimal PDF
objects.

If you use a generic Postscript print driver in Windows, most of the
time, the Windows print system generates inefficient rastered objects,
let alone tons of bitmaps -- especially for TrueType fonts that it
cannot associate with Adobe Type 1 fonts.  So you big, bloated
Postscript files outputted from Windows.

If you now pump that big, bloated PS file into Aladin Ghostscript's
PS->PDF converter, it cannot do much for you once most things have been
rastered as bitmaps.

Conclusion:  *WINDOWS* Postscript is the problem, *NOT* Linux.  Adobe
Distiller allows you to "bypass" this "problem" when generating PDFs.

Unfortunately, when you go to print them under Windows, the problem
comes back.  I mean, have you ever tried to print a large PDF in Acrobat
Reader in Windows?  Ever have to print it piecemeal?  That's because the
Windows Postscript engine sucks.  And Adobe can't do much about it
either.

Take the same PDF, and go over to Acrobat Reader on Linux, Solaris or
Mac.  No problems, eh?  Seen this time and time again!

Nearly all non-Windows print systems use Postscript.  As such, most
applications render Postscript nice and natively.  There are still some
inefficiencies.  Some of that goes back to the fact that most
documentation applications are not designed with professional
publication and typeset in mind, which PDF is geared towards.

Gnomeprint will eventually learn to do a lot of PDF features.  Of
course, it won't always understand the underlying application and its
components.  So it will never be quite as good as a program that is
designed for professional publication.

That's where Adobe's FrameMaker (among other products) come in.  They
can directly output PDFs directly, with all their little components
optimally rendered.  From the document structure, bookmarks,
hyperreferences and links are automatically generated in the resulting
PDF.  The MSWord-Distiller approach requires you to enter a number of
these things (let alone outside of MSWord -- where Distiller understands
even less).

In the OSS world, we have Donald Knuth's TeX typeset.  Knuth was the
first to create an open standard typeset, circa 1979, when just about
every professional publiciation houses used a proprietary typeset
language and equipment.  There wasn't even a standard way to describe
equations -- something of a major issue in the days before WYSIWYG --
that TeX addressed.  The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) quickly
recognized the power of TeX.  Thanx to the fact that 25% of all the
world's technical publications are from the IEEE, TeX is much more
widely used than people realize.

It has its own world of macros, styles and other add-ons built around
it.  Anything that can be printed can be described in TeX.  Because of
this, TeX is given consideration, and conversion programs are almost
always written anytime a new language is designed.  This includes
DocBook, both SGML/DSSSL and XML/XSL flavors, as well as the new MathML
standard and, as I mentioned previously, PDF.  IBM even produced a TeX
plug-in for web browsers, although it never really caught on.

TeX's greatest strength, its age, extensive library and add-ons is also
an issue.  It's so big, there is no way a GUI could describe all its
attributes.  Enter LyX, a TeX WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean). 
LyX uses the most popular TeX macroset, LaTeX, and then only about 5% of
it.  LyX can also do a good subset of DocBook.  But the most powerful
feature of LyX is that the GUI does not limit you -- because you can
enter unsupported TeX/DocBook tags in-line.

Today I write letters, resumes, articles and, most importantly, books of
hundreds of pages of length in LyX.  In one click, I can export PDF with
auto-generated bookmarks and hyperreferences in the document.  So when a
user clicks on a section, they go to it, as well as when they click on a
page in the table of contents, or even the index, glossary, bibliography
or footer note.  All references without any additional effort, with one
simple script.

Powerful stuff.  My wife uses MSWord-Distiller and MSPublisher-Distiller
daily, and is increasingly using LyX/PDFTeX just because it's a crapload
faster to product documentation -- good look and _uniform_ (a _big_
issue with large MSWord documents) at that.

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith    mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org   chat:thebs413
Engineer  AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.  http://www.linux-wlan.org
President    SmithConcepts, Inc.    http://www.SmithConcepts.com
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