From: George White <george@bodnext.bio.dfo.ca>
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Summary:  slides from TeX(tures)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 13:20:50 -0400
Organization: Info-Tex<==>Comp.Text.Tex Gateway
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The original post described our (too) cumbersome procedure for obtaining
color slides from TeX on a Mirus (non-postscript) film printer:

1. save the file as Illustrator 88 Postcript
2. import into Adobe Photoshop, which renders the PS

3. apply a color lookup table (a different table is needed for each
   foreground color used)


All the proposed solutions were based on the color extensions (\specials)

in dvips, and all but one involve spending money:

1.  get a PostScript film printer and use dvips (which supports \specials
that allow you to set the background and foreground colors).

2.  use dvips with an external PostScript rasterizer such as Ghostscript
(free),  Freedom of Press (Color Age Inc., tel.: 800.873.4367(US),
508.667.8585), TScript (email: 47146958@mcimail.com, tel.: 617.734.9700),
Professional Output Manager (Visual Business Systems, tel.: 404.956.0325(US)
0753.821234(UK)), Magic RIP (Knowlege Software, tel. 914.762.7667).  I
contacted Color Age and the maker of TScript.  Neither vendor was

familiar with the BSR TeX fonts so could not assure me that their
software would work with these fonts.


Since Ghostscript is free and runs reliably, I have tried it.  Unfortunately,
the font quality suffers.  One suggestion was to render the slide at a high
resolution and reduce the size.  This is not very practical--Adobe Photoshop
uses fonts rendered at 4x the desired resolution to get 16 levels of grey.

Doing this on a full page creates very large files.  Lines that TeX
renders at one pixel wide are converted to grey in the reduced image.
Thus it appears that anti-aliasing should be applied to the font
bitmaps.

Some time ago we discussed support for Illustrator PostScript with
Blue Sky Research (makers of TeXtures), and were told they were considering
dropping this option in favor of a generic EPS option (what dvips already
has), but certainly were not interested in extending their support to Adobe
Illustrator 3 and color.

It is worth remarking that the anti-aliasing in Photoshop is based on using
Adobe Type Manager to provide font bitmaps at 2x, 3x, or 4x the desired
resolution.  In principle, anti-aliased color fonts could be obtained from
TeX pk fonts, but in practical terms it appears that PostScript fonts are
more likely to work with existing tools.

An Adobe Illustrator output option would be a very useful extension to

to dvips.  Adobe provided good documentation for earlier versions of
Adobe Illustrator file formats, but has not released the current

format.  Many drawing packages can import Illustrator file formats, or
can place Illustrator format files using a generic EPS mechanism.  This
would simplify the use of TeX in preparing illustrations, particularly

color illustrations.

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