Problem: PDF or AppleWorks?
Posted December 10th, 2003 @ 08:55am by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm updating some documentation for some products today (new site, new products, later today!) and printing them to PDF. I'm using AppleWorks, primarily for familiarity and because LaTeX doesn't give me all the control I need. Unfortunately, there exists a problem when printing to PDF. You can see the problem in the image at right.
It's probably an AppleWorks problem (as the software is, what, five years old?). It seems that AppleWorks and the PDF renderer have different ideas as to how wide particular fonts may be. This wreaks all sorts of havoc on our table of contents (where we have a series of periods, a tab, and then the page #).
Any ideas? Saying "yeah, AppleWorks' font handling leaves a lot to be desired" isn't an answer, but saying "yes, AppleWorks is using a different method to calculate font widths (it doesn't take into account anti-aliasing)" is acceptable. Is that the answer?
4 Responses to "Problem: PDF or AppleWorks?"
Posted 10 Dec 2003 at 10:50am #
Have you tried setting the ..... range to a fixed-width font? Might be the alternative you need.
Posted 10 Dec 2003 at 12:00pm #
Are the periods entered manually or provided by the tab fill? It looks fine to me when I do the latter.
Posted 11 Dec 2003 at 8:43am #
Try:
AppleWorks menu -> Preferences -> General -> Text (topic popup).
Toggle "Fractional Character Widths". This used to fix a lot of printing errors, haven't tried it for quite a while.
- proton
Posted 02 Jan 2004 at 6:32am #
QUOTE
and because LaTeX doesn't give me all the control I need.
Me thinks you need to learn more about LaTeX 😎