FAQ - How do I create a ps or pdf file of my paper?Postscript
What is postscript?Postscript is a powerful and widely used page description language developed and owned by Adobe. When you print a document on a postscript printer the document is first converted into this language and subsequently sent to the printer. Before being sent to the printer the converted document may be captured into a file in ps format. This file may be saved and distributed over the internet and then can be viewed and printed at any location on different platforms. The ps file may be saved with different options. The option Optimize for portability - ADSC ensures the widest possible distribution. Postscript files are ASCII files and may be quite large. For transmission or storing they may advantageously be zipped or gzipped. How do I create a postscript file of my Windows document?It is quite simple to create a postscript file if you have a postscript printer installed on your Windows PC. The procedure works for MS Word documents and documents created in other Windows applications. If you do not have a postscript printer installed then install one first. Make sure that the printer driver prints to file.
How do I create a postscript file of my LaTeX document on my Windows or MSDOS PC?The standard way to convert a LaTeX document to a postscript file is to use dvips. This is normally part of TeX installations for PC such as EMTeX and MIKTeX. Dvips converts a dvi file into a postscript (ps) file. After having created your dvi file, named mypaper.dvi, say, simply type dvips mypaper on the DOS command line. This produces a postscript file with the name mypaper.ps. Alternatively, on a Windows PC you may open the document in your dvi viewer (such as dviwin or yap), and print it to a postscript file (see How do I create a postscript file of my Windows document?) The latter procedure also works in TeX installations such as Scientific Workplace that do not support dvips. How do I create a postscript file of my LaTeX document under UNIX?The standard way to convert a LaTeX document to a postscript file under UNIX is to use dvips. Dvips converts a dvi file into a ps file. After having created your dvi file, named mypaper.dvi, say, simply type dvips -o mypaper.ps mypaper on the command line. This creates a postscript file with the name mypaper.ps. A shorter version of the same command is dvips mypaper -o but this may not work on all installations. Postscript files may be viewed with ghostview (distributed with ghostscript). How do I install a postscript printer on my Windows PC?This is easy if you have the Windows installation CD available.
If you do not have the Windows installation CD handy then you can get a very good postscript driver from the Adobe website http://www.adobe.com/. Make sure that you select the correct version for your system, and follow the instructions. How do I view and print a postscript file on my Windows PC?To view and print a postscript file on your PC you need a postscript viewer. This is usually not part of the standard installation of a Windows PC. A well-known and excellent freeware postscript viewer is GSview, which may be downloaded from the website http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/. GSview may also be used to view and print pdf files, and to convert postscript files into pdf files. What is pdf?Pdf − Portable Document Format − also is a page description format developed and owned by Adobe. It is a compressed and adapted version of postscript. Pdf files have a much smaller size than the corresponding ps files. To view pdf files you need Acrobat Reader. If this is not installed on your system then Windows and UNIX versions may be downloaded free of charge from the Adobe website http://www.adobe.com. Under UNIX you may also use xpdf to view pdf files. Recent versions of Ghostview (UNIX) and GSView (Windows) also support pdf. Pdf files are binary files, so make sure that you use the right setting when you transmit them by ftp. How do I create a pdf file of my Windows document?To convert your Windows document (such as an MS Word document) into a pdf file you need Adobe Acrobat. This is a commercial product. Acrobat 5 and 6 come with the Distiller printer driver and with PDFMaker for Word. Earlier versions of Adobe Acrobat supported pdfwriter, which is no longer recommended. If you wish to use PDFMaker for MS Word to create a pdf file from your Word document then follow these steps:
To use Adobe Distiller follow these steps:
Scientific Workplace users bewareIf you create a pdf document from your SWP Tex file then make sure that all fonts are embedded in the pdf file. If you do not use this option then the pdf document will not look the way you expect it to and the equations will not be readable on computers that do not have the SWP fonts installed. See the Technical Support Knowledgebase of MacKichan Software at http://www.mackichan.com/ How do I convert a postscript file to a pdf file on my Windows PC?These are several ways to convert a postscript file to a pdf file on a Windows PC:
How do I create a quality pdf file of my LaTeX document under Windows or UNIX?Under Windows, quality pdf files may be created using a recent version of the distribution MiKTeX of TeX. Under UNIX, quality pdf files may be created using a recent version of the teTeX distribution of TeX. With both distributions, first prepare the dvi file, and then use these commands: dvips -Ppdf -G0 mypaper.dvi ps2pdf mypaper.ps Do not omit the two options from the dvips command. If necessary you may include the additional option -tA4 or -tLetter in the dvips command to control the paper size. In both distributions there also exists the command pdflatex mypaper.tex but this does not always work reliably. Recent versions of ghostview (UNIX, distributed with ghostscript) and GSView (Windows) can also read and display pdf files. Good resolution of documents produced from LaTeX may also be achieved by using standard postscript fonts instead of Computer Modern fonts. To this end, insert a command such as \usepackage{times} or \usepackage{mathptm} in the preamble of the LaTeX2e source file. This also makes the pdf files much smaller. Free conversion to pdf on the web: ps2pdf.com and goBCL.comThere are various sites on the worldwide web that offer free conversion to pdf.
|