LaTeX Notes

Here are a few LaTeX tricks I've picked up. Some of these took me a while to figure out, so hopefully you might find them useful.

• colordvi
  The colordvi package provides named colours that can be included by doing, for example, \Red{red text goes here}. Here is a document that lists and displays all the colours available in this package. [TEX] [PS.GZ] [PDF]
• Landscape Trick
  Do you every get frusted that "dvips -t landscape" always results in upside-down (seascape) pages? Well the trick to solve this problem is to include the following line near the top of your document (one version of it, anyway). More info on this can be found at the Official dvips Home Page
  • \special{! TeXDict begin /landplus90{true}store end }
    or maybe just \special{! /landplus90 true store}
• Type 1 Fonts - Making PDF's look good
  Blind use of dvips + ps2pdf results in PDF files that look terrible in Adobe Acrobat. The problem is with Type 3 Postscript fonts. To get your document to use Type 1 fonts instead, and hence get good-looking PDF's, use one of the following methods.
  • pdflatex file.tex
  • dvips -Pamz -Pcmz -o outfile.ps infile.dvi, then ps2pdf outfile.ps
  • dvips -Ppdf -o outfile.ps infile.dvi, then ps2pdf outfile.ps
• ps2pdf: Preserving Image Quality
  By default ps2pdf compresses images for inclusion in the pdf file. This can result in images of unacceptably poor quality (e.g. ). The trick to avoiding this is to use the following flags when invoking ps2pdf:

        ps2pdf -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.2 \
               -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true \
               -dAutoFilterColorImages=false \
               -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false \
               -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
               -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
               -dModoImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
               file.ps
         
  

  To see the difference in results, compare the following files original.ps, bad.pdf, and good.pdf. This tip was obtained from the VIS 2004 conference website.
• Hyperref & List of Figures
  When converting my thesis to a pdf, I discovered that inclusion of the hyperref package causes multi-line captions in a List of Figures or List of Tables to be written entirely on one line. The trick to avoiding this problem is to pass the option linktocpages to hyperref. The resulting code looks something like:

        \usepackage[dvips,letterpaper,linktocpage]{hyperref}
        \hypersetup{
            pdfauthor = {David A. Ross},
            pdftitle = {Learning Parts-Based Representations of Data},
            pdfsubject = {M.Sc. Thesis}
        }