I've run LyX on RedHat, Fedora, and Ubuntu Linux at various times for about 10 years. Until a year or so, the LaTeX distribution was TeTeX, but recently I've converted over to TeXLive.
Like many other LyX users, I've been wrestling with PDF output from LyX for a long time. It used to be that the default fonts in LyX would look very bad in PDF output. There were a number of workarounds considered in this list. For a long time, I've followed Herbert V's the advice to use the lmodern fonts in order to get nice PDF output. That still appears to be the best advice in the LyX wiki: http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/PDF In recent times, however, we've seen PDF output that looks really bad in Adobe Acrobat reader 8 if a document uses the lmodern fonts. The problem is that, at some levels of magnification, the fonts are "uneven" on the screen. I uploaded a screenshot http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/adobeUnevenFonts.pdf As far as I can tell, the output on paper is fine. It is not uneven as it appears on the screen in acroread. If I change the document to different fonts, I don't see that same kind of uneven output. Some of my students generate PDF output that is worse, some better. Students who have Windows machines on which they primarily use Chinese seem to have the worst trouble. In Linux, I can use other pdf readers, but it appears Windows users are pretty much stuck with Adobe. I've seen this problem recently on Ubuntu 8.04 with TeXLive and also with Centos Linux 5.2 with TexLive. So that is making me thing it is a TexLive problem. pj -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
