Paul Johnson wrote:
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljoh...@gmail.com> wrote:
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
I'm sorry. The screenshot is a png, not pdf, so I've renamed it:
http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/adobeUnevenFonts.png
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.
I don't know what's up with the Windows boxes with Chinese users, but do
you have any reported display problems with AR on Windows boxes where
the users employ the typical US/UK type code pages?
As far as Linux goes, I use Latin Modern in all my beamer presentations,
and AFAIK they look ok in Ubuntu using AR 8.1.3, at least on screen.
(When I project them in class, I'm using a Win XP laptop.) When I first
ported my presentations to the Ubuntu machine (I built them in Win XP),
I recall having some font adventures with Latin Modern, which were
resolved by installing the lmodern package from the Ubuntu repository.
I'm using TeXLive on the Ubuntu machine, and IIRC lmodern was not part
of my TeXLive installation; I had to install it separately. The lmodern
package includes X11 font files. If you're getting funky screen output
on a Linux box, I would first look at the X11 fonts (likely location:
/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/) to make sure they're present. If AR can't
find the display version of the font, I think it will make an arbitrary
(and perhaps capricious?) substitution.
HTH,
Paul
