I am not understanding your question either but the two screenshots are using the same fonts. Just one is being rendered poorly for unknown reasons. <div> </div><div>Robby On Saturday, June 28, 2014, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <<a href="mailto:samth@cs.indiana.edu">samth@cs.indiana.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Matthew Flatt <<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'mflatt@cs.utah.edu')">mflatt@cs.utah.edu</a>> wrote: > At Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:43:46 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote: >> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Matthew Flatt <<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'mflatt@cs.utah.edu')">mflatt@cs.utah.edu</a>> wrote: >> > At Fri, 27 Jun 2014 11:56:39 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote: >> >> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Matthew Flatt <<a href="javascript:;" onclick="_e(event, 'cvml', 'mflatt@cs.utah.edu')">mflatt@cs.utah.edu</a>> wrote: >> >> > For some reason, the way that PDF fragments are pulled in by `pdflatex` >> >> > makes the fragments look worse in some PDF viewers/machines than the >> >> > way that PS fragments are pulled in by `latex` plus `dvips`. I think it >> >> > has to do with heuristics in PDF viewers, and I think there's no >> >> > difference when going to a printer. >> >> >> >> My impression was that PDF was supposed to be a pixel-accurate format, >> >> at least when self-contained and not using system fonts, and thus >> >> there wouldn't be any such heuristics. Is that not true? >> > >> > PDF is a vector-graphics format, not a raster-graphics format (so it >> > doesn't really say anything about pixels). >> >> Right -- what I meant was that at a given size, rendering should be >> pixel-accurate, so that you shouldn't see differences between >> different viewers (unlike, say, HTML, which doesn't prescribe layout >> nearly as precisely). > > Maybe the alignment problem (now fixed) in Robby's example obscured the > issue. It's just about the smoothness of the rendering. > > That is, PDF specifies exactly where things should be on a cartesian > plane, but renderers draw the same image with different pixels > depending on the display resolution, how much time the renderer spends > on anti-aliasing, and so on. The "look worse" part above was meant only > about the appearance of shape edges, and not about shapes being in the > wrong location. In the particular `e ::= ...` example, this is an issue of font rendering, right? IOW, the shapes being drawn differently between dvipdf and pdflatex are fonts placed in particular spots on the page. Sam </blockquote></div>