[texhax] latex vs. pdflatex

[Haruhiko Okumura]

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

> That said, if you absolutely must pick one or the other, I would pick
> pdftex, except in the unlikely event that you care about non-PostScript
> output.  The reason is that pdf can be converted to PS with (I believe)
> no loss of information, while going from DVI to PDF via dvipdfm or
> ps2pdf can introduce quality degradation and font issues far more
> troublesome than the original .sty ones.  In my experience, anyway.

OT, but we Japanese have to live with dvi->pdf because there's no
multibyte extension to pdfTeX but a good one to dvipdfm:

http://project.ktug.or.kr/dvipdfmx/

I can't find any quality degradation compared with another path from
dvi to PDF: dvips + (ps2pdf or Distiller).  Distiller tends to produce
smaller PDFs, though.

-- 
Haruhiko Okumura <okumura at matsusaka-u.ac.jp>
Matsusaka University, 1846 Kubo-cho, Matsusaka, 515-8511 Japan
http://www.matsusaka-u.ac.jp/~okumura/