7.2.1. From .lyx to .pdf

The classic way to transform a . lyx document to PDF format is to follow a three-pass procedure: first, the .lyx document is exported to DVI, then to PS through dvi2ps, then the PS version is tranformed to PDF through software like the commercial Acrobat® Distiller®[1], or the freely available Ghostscript. (via ps2pdf).

This classic three-pass procedure is not only complicated, it also loses some information through the intermediate DVI format. The results are often not acceptable: the most frequent problem is bad presentation of the character glyphs that make up the document (see Quality of PDF from PostScript):

• Wrong type of fonts used, which is the commonest cause of fuzzy text.

• ghostscript too old, which can also result in fuzzy text.

• Switching to font encoding T1, which is yet another possible cause of fuzzy text.

• Another problem - missing characters - arises from an aged version of Acrobat® Distiller®.

• Finally, there's the common confusion that arises from using the dvips configuration file -Ppdf, the weird characters.

It would be much better to produce the PDF version directly from the TeX (i.e. LyX) output. The pdftex package (see Section 3.5) was created with this objective in mind. pdftex (and pdfjadetex) creates the PDF document in one pass from the TeX format. A disadvantage of pdftex and pdfjadetex used to be the complexity of the preliminary steps (see Chapter 4, especially Section 4.9) needed to get a LaTeX document converted to PDF, escecially when it contained images. Not anymore: the method described here automates the format transormations for the images and hides the complexity of the commands involved in three files (sedscr, jadetex.cfg, lyxtox). See Section 7.2.2.