writing pdfs

[Alexander Haderer]

At 08:31 10.10.2003 -0400, William O'Higgins wrote:
>I have grown tired of using MS Word as my standard document output
>format.  I haven't gotten OpenOffice to work under FreeBSD (and it isn't
>my favourite tool by a long shot) and I am most happy generating text in
>vi.  PDF is eminently portable, and I think that it would suit my
>purposes nicely.
>
>I had some thoughts about generating PDFs, but I was hoping for advice
>about which tools to use.  Should I just learn how to mark up a text
>page manually (I write HTML almost as quickly as plain text)?

I think no, because:
- "modern" pdf uses compression
- pdf has/may have a non linear contents: page one may be located somewhere 
in the pdf.
- Expect pdf readers that behave strange when displaying odd pdf files

>Should I
>learn TeX or some variant and translate it?

My opinion: yes. Learn the basics of LaTeX and use pdflatex instead of 
latex to create pdf files directly from your tex source. The "old" way of 
generating pdf via tex->dvi->ps->pdf via the classic (la)tex commands has 
the disadvantage that you have to deal with different ps-fontencodings 
(type 1 / type 3 or Pixelfont vs. Outline font) with the bad sideeffect 
that your pdfs have crippled and slow display on screen while printing 
works fine. google is full of messages regarding this topic.

Advantages of (la)tex: the possibility to include images into your 
documents without problem and tables and footnotes and index and table of X 
and ...

pdflatex is part of the (almost) complete tex distribution teTeX: 
/usr/ports/print/teTeX. This port has lots of documentation onboard. For 
more information about tex see:

     http://www.ctan.org/


If you think tex is much too fat for your needs because you only want to 
write some lines of text consider using groff (base system) with ps output 
and then convert this output to pdf via ps2pdf (part of 
/usr/ports/print/ghostscript-gnu-XXX)

Alexander