LaTeX -> PDF

Short guide to produce nice PDFs from LaTeX sources which contain images. ps2pdf applies JPEG encoding to the images, even when optimizing for prepress, which can cause certain images to become very ugly when printed. One should also take care to include only Type 1 fonts, otherwise the PDF will look fuzzy on your screen.

dvips -Ppdf -o -t a4 foo.dvi

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dEncodeColorImages=false \
  -dEncodeMonoImages=false -dEncodeGrayImages=false foo.ps

These settings stop ps2pdf from compressing your images altogether, which makes the PDF quite large but accurate. Zip-compression should also be supported, but I have as yet been unable to get it working.

For more information see all ps2pdf options and Joris Portegies Zwart's page.