What are the relative merits of pdflatex?

Question

Not sure this is a programming question, but we use LaTeX for all our API documentation and user documentation, so I hope it will go through.

Can someone please explain what are the relative merits of using pdflatex as opposed to the "classic" technique of

latex foo
dvips -Ppdf foo
ps2pdf foo.ps

From time to time I run into people who have difficulty because things don't work in pdflatex, and I know that using pdflatex gives up two things I have grown to value:

• Can't use the very speedy xdvi viewer
• Can't use the PStricks package

I should add that I typically get PDF with hyperlinks by using something on the order of

\usepackage[ps2pdf,colorlinks=true]{hyperref}

so it's not necessary to use pdflatex to get good PDF.

So

1. What are the advantages of pdflatex that I don't know about?
2. What are the disadvantages of the old tools that I've overlooked?

Answer 1

My favorite pdflatex feature is the microtype package, which is available only when using pdflatex to go directly to PDF, and really produces stunning results with no effort on my part. Apart from that, the only caveats I run into are image formats:

• pdflatex supports PDF, PNG, and JPG images.
• the postscript drivers support (at least) EPS.

Also, if you want to install fonts, the procedures are slightly different depending on what fonts that driver supports. (Hint: use XeTeX to instantly enable OpenType fonts.)

Answer 2

Also pdftex is the engine under development (towards luatex) and maintenance. I'm not sure the DVI counterparts are as actively maintained.

PStricks is supplanted by Tikz.

I didn't use xdvi in years, so pardon the trollish rhetorical questions: Does xdvi display vector fonts? Does it support synctex (jumping to and from code)? Does it have the confort of use of PDF readers like Skim?

Answer 3

As it turns out, I recently read a post that shows the difference directly. Any document that uses tables or narrow columns will be improved automatically. I also find the inter-word spacing to be far more pleasing with pdflatex.

Is xdvi much faster than xpdf? I find the edit, TeX, view cycle to be very quick with pdflatex.

Have you tried MetaPost or MetaFun for graphics? I tend to put graphics creation in the hands of the capable, but MetaFun would likely be the package I'd use. Just reading the manuals is a pleasure.

Answer 4

I used pdflatex to generate the PDF for my ICFP 2009 paper. (I still needed to use standard latex to generate the PostScript file.) I did so for two reasons:

1. I couldn't seem to get ps2pdf to generate Letter, rather than A4 output, no matter what command line options I used.

2. For the printers, I needed to produce a version 1.3 PDF file, not 1.4. pdflatex made this easy to do. I set the PDF author and title information while I was at it.

Both of these problems may be fixable in some way, but as a first-time latex user, I didn't find any obvious solutions, nor did more experienced users whom I'd asked.

Answer 5

What may become a reason to prefer pdf-based texs to ps-based texs is support for tagged PDF: there is no similar standard for expressing metadata in postscript. When publishers demand tagged pdfs, suddenly you might care.

There's some experimental support for generating tagged pdfs in pdftex. Cf. Ross Moore's DML'09 talk.

Answer 6

Taco Hoekwater is working on Escrito, a Postscript interpreter written in Lua, which would allow you to use pstricks in Luatex. He has an impressive project completion record: maybe I should have used "will" rather than "would" in the previous sentence.