[TxMt] Re: TextMate typesetting problems

[T. Zha]

On Jan 1, 2014, at 1:00 PM, Max Lein <realoreocookie at gmx.de> wrote:

On 01.01.2014, at 07:00 , textmate-request at lists.macromates.com wrote:

> Actually I would recommend you and everyone to use the ?latex? engine instead of pdflatex.  
I'm very well-versed in LaTeX, and I started with the non-pdf latex many moons ago. If it were up to me, I'd use xelatex because of its superior handling of fonts, but the arxiv doesn't support it and most collaborators don't know about it or care to use it. (The arxiv still on TeX Live 2011, too.) pdflatex is the de-facto standard for good reason. 

> With latex, you can typeset eps figures directly without converting it to pdf figures and the resulting pdf file has a much sharper resolution than those produced by pdflatex applied to pdf figures, especially when you use the beamer for presentation.
Actually, eps is a format of the past, most programs (e. g. xfig) can output either directly to pdf or a pdf/LaTeX combo. Even if you get eps output (e. g. from gnuplot's using the eps+latex output), loading a single package (epstopdf) takes care of the on-the-fly conversion (which does *not* reduce the resolution, I think it just encapsulates the eps file into a pdf wrapper). This reduction in quality only happens if someone manually converts the eps file to pdf with the wrong tool in the wrong way. 

During typesetting, you lose pdfsync which is a very handy feature (clicking in a location in the pdf file sends you to the corresponding line in your latex code). Moreover, pdf files which are generated from the intermediate dvi files often have lower quality (e. g. font rendering is worse, text no longer is searchable and hyperlinks may stop working). 

I've only dealt with one journal that used latex instead of pdflatex (and another one which strangely enough doesn't seem to use latex at all on its backend). 

If latex works for you, fine, but I don't understand why you force others to cling to the old. (I would not force my students to use TeX in any particular way.) Especially when it seems to be due to just not knowing about well-known solutions to old problems. 

Max

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