PostScript files from latex blurred

Answer 1

I believe Preview anti-aliases by default. How do they look when you blow them up a bit? How do they look when printed? Have you tried examining them in ghostscript (or gv or ggv, or any other viewer)?

If it is the viewer you're using then it's not LaTeX, and not properly programming related.

Answer 2

This might be a problem that results from the standard way dvips works. If you are creating the files yourself you should make sure dvips uses PostScript Type 1 fonts. Details on this can be found here. A probably easier alternative would be to use pdflatex and skip PostScript entirely. Also, I believe the blurred presentation should be on screen only, when printed for me such files are usually fine.

Answer 3

I've been bothered by this too, so I looked it up just now. [Anyone: Please edit this answer if it's wrong.] As the others have said,

1. it's probably just the viewer (Preview), and printing it will look fine. Nevertheless, if you're trying to read it on screen, "it will look fine in print" is not much of a consolation. :)
2. The problem happens because Preview converts from PS to PDF before displaying it. (This "blurry" problem is also common in PDF files that have been generated from PS.) The best fix is to use pdflatex directly.

If you must go through PostScript, see the Quality of PDF from PostScript at the UK TeX FAQ, which points to a few common reasons why the PDF might be fuzzy:

• The wrong type of fonts in PDF: This is apparently the most common in older versions of PDF viewers (e.g. before Adobe Reader 6, released in mid-2003). The problem is that dvips's default is to embed Type 3 fonts, and the PDF viewer probably does a bad job of displaying bitmapped fonts. So force the PS file to use Type 1 fonts, by generating it as:

  dvips -Ppdf myfile -o myfile.ps
  

• Fonts go fuzzy when you switch to T1: If you have \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, that might be a problem.("Note that the font encoding T1 has nothing directly to do with the font format Type 1".) There are fixes.

• a couple of other unlikely reasons, such as Ghostscript being too old.

Also, look at the testflow package, which is a ‘diagnostic suite which is designed to test LaTeX "print work flow" and to provide lots of helpful information [...]’.

Of course, if you're not generating the PS yourself, then the simple answer is that Preview sucks, and you should use a better PostScript viewer instead, e.g. install gv through MacPorts or Fink, or MacGSView from here, or MacGhostView, or ($22) PostView.

Answer 4

As others have said, this is a problem at the source end. In short, bitmap fonts are being used, which render fine these days in Adobe Reader but in the past have looked absolutely terrible; Preview's behaviour used to be better but is now worse than Reader's.

The way to fix the problem is to load the Latin Modern fonts:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

(Several years ago the solution was to install the CM-Super fonts, but the newer Latin Modern fonts are better.)

Answer 5

Fonts appear fuzzy because most viewers do not deal well with bitmap fonts. Just make sure your documents use vector fonts.

I didn't have to fight to get correct fonts in years (except maybe some funny symbols that still only exist as bitmaps). I don't even think specifying T1 is needed anymore. So a good step to the solution would be to simply upgrade your LaTeX distribution to a recent one (e.g. TeXlive 2008) and lobby your colleagues to do the same.