dvips options

[Amadeus W. M.]

On Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:10:50 -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:

> To go from latex to pdf I use dvips and the adobe online encoding.
> I can't use pdflatex or PDFTex because my documents use gnuplot
> generated tex files that contain postscript (this allows me to have
> LaTeX render the text part of the graphs, and makes it easier to adjust
> the axis labeling, which on 3D plots sometimes conflict with the axis
> and need to be moved, depending upon the view perspective).
> 
> I go from ps to pdf via Adobe online encoding because sometimes
> ghostscript (ps2pdf) messes up, and you often can't tell until you have
> printed it - but sometimes its really obvious (like putting letters on
> top of each other). Distiller (online encoding) gets it right.
> 
> I have a prosper class latex document (PDF slide show). It needs to be
> A4 landscape.
> It also must be done dvi -> pd -> pdf because prosper uses pstricks
> 
> When I use dvips -Ppdf
> 
> I get a landscape but it is letter, right side of slides chopped.
> 
> If I use dvips -Ppdf -t a4
> 
> It does get done a4 by online - but portrait, so I have to rotate it to
> properly view it.
> 
> If I use dvips -Ppdf -t a4 -t landscape
> 
> I still get portrait A4
> 
> -=-
> Does anyone know either
> 
> a) A proper option sequence to give to dvips to get A4 landscape out of
> Adobe online encoding
> 
> b) A proper way to modify the output of dvips (the postscript file) to
> make sure it really is landscape a4
> 
> c) A way to modify an existing PDF file so that it is landscape by
> default
> 
> Either one of those (a would obviously be best) would solve my problem.
> 
> Thanks for suggestions.


Here are some tricks that I know, that you can try.

1) dvips uses A4 by default (at least a while back), which is longer than
letter. You print on letter, hence the truncation. To fix this, tell dvips
to use letter by default. At the end of

/usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps

add 
t letter

Alternatively, put 

t letter

in ~/.dvipsrc.

2) ps2pdf produces bad fonts in the pdf file. To fix this, put

p +psfonts.cmz
p +psfonts.amz

in ~/.dvipsrc, then run dvips with the -Ppdf flag:

dvips -Ppdf -o file.ps file.dvi
ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Of course, as with the letter size, the changes can be made global by
putting them in /usr/share/.../config.ps.

3) As an alternative to dvips + ps2pdf you can try dvipdfm.

4) Although you mentioned this, I think the cleanest alternative remains
pdflatex. The fact that gnuplot produces ps files should not be a problem.
Convert them to pdf using either ps2pdf OR convert (from ImageMagick). You
must use the [pdftex] option with some packages:

\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx,color}

You may have to specify a bounding box for some pdf images that you
converted from ps, like this:

\includegraphics[bb=10 20 100 200]{file}

When running pdflatex, file.pdf must exist in the local directory. With
latex, file.ps must be there. 


The reference document for importing graphics is this:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/epslatex.pdf