Some experience with LyX (LaTeX) and PDF:
* Ghostscript's ps2pdf creates huge files due to the
non-compression of bitmap images. Also, the file is ugly
to view on-screen because the Type-1 (vector) fonts are
sampled to Type-3 (bitmap) fonts. PDF readers can't use
anti-aliasing in this case and printers can only print in
the maximum resolution that was given by dvips.
(lyx->latex->dvips->ps2pdf)
* Adobe Acrobat Distiller gives very good results. Fonts
remain scalable and are easy to read on-screen. Bitmap
images get compressed via zip or jpeg. The only
inconvience is that it's not free and that it's not
available for Unix. If you are doing business or need good
PDF quality for other reasons then you're best with paying
the licence. It's worth it for me.
(lyx->latex->dvips->distiller)
* pdf(la)tex is an alternativ to the tex compiler that
generates directly pdf files instead of dvi. I haven't
used it intensively but it promises to be fantastic. Fonts
are in perfect shape, scalable and readable and you don't
need to generate huge eps files from your png or jpeg
images, they can be used directly without loss of quality
or disk space. An inconvience is that eps vector graphics
can't be read, they have to be converted to pdf manually.
I had problems with this. But this may be due to the
university-wide TeX installation. A direct import of fig
figures would be fantastic. Another inconvience is that
lyx has no support for pdftex, i.e. you need to deal
yourself with the inclusion of png, jpg and pdf images.
(Developers: hint, hint...)
(lyx->pdflatex)
Hope this little overview helped a bit to get even more confused and
continue discussing this important issue in order to find a better
solution and end all wars.
Ralf
