10

I'm not trying anything fancy just a plain vanilla

\title{Practical Node.js  }

However, in Linux the results look great (Document Viewer 3.2.1)

In windows it looks absolutely terrible (Adobe Reader 9)

Edit: I'm rendering PDFs online using http://www.scribtex.com

Edit2: Looks like it may be a problem with my reader on windows. Taking a different PDF compare

Linux, smooth rendering

to

Windows, blurry font

These are the fonts embedded in the document:

screenshot of the fonts used in the document

diabonas
  • 25,784
deltanovember
  • 427
  • 2
    Using different readers is a heck of a variable. How does acroread render the PDF on Linux? – Sharpie Feb 12 '12 at 20:42
  • Beside the difference caused by the PDF reader you use, it seems to me that you use a bitmap font in Windows and a vector font in Linux... – Count Zero Feb 12 '12 at 22:05

2 Answers2

24

You do not use the Type 1 versions of Computer Modern on your Windows TeX installation. Install the cm-super fonts or better the Latin Modern fonts and use:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
Community
  • 1
  • I made an edit to the original question to reflect how the rendering is being done. In both cases the same PDF is produced by scribtex.com. I have added the packages and the rendering unfortunately still looks ordinary on Windows. Funnily enough it looks fantastic in Windows/Chrome. – deltanovember Feb 12 '12 at 21:02
  • compare the embedded fonts in both pdf files. Are they identical? –  Feb 12 '12 at 21:05
  • There is only a single PDF file. These are the fonts that are embedded http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12337149/code/embedded.png the list is the same on both operating systems – deltanovember Feb 12 '12 at 21:43
  • I suggest trying to compile it using a normal LaTeX install. Are you using PDFTeX? XeTeX? LuaTeX? – Canageek Feb 12 '12 at 22:24
  • I have tried compiling with pdflatex and xelatex. I have amended my question I think it might be a reader issue – deltanovember Feb 12 '12 at 22:32
  • 1
    I compiled a small example on scribtex.com. The resulting pdf uses type1 fonts (cm-super fonts), so the font type is not the problem. It must be a problem with the reader (or the settings in the reader). – Ulrike Fischer Feb 13 '12 at 10:34
2

It looks like Adobe Reader has some unfortunate defaults

http://tex.aanhet.net/rugtex/adoberead.html

Turning on font smoothing fixed things

deltanovember
  • 427
  • 3
    You should not be using Adobe Reader to begin with on Windows machine. SumatraPDF viewer is far superior PDF viewer on Windows. If you like to stick to SumatraPDF libraries I would suggest that you try MuPDF on your Linux machine instead of other PDF viewers. – Predrag Punosevac Feb 13 '12 at 01:47
  • 3
    I would usually agree but came across some weird thing recently. Using Adobe Reader the generated letter looks nice, with its correct colors. Sumatra, however, shows completely different colors which do not match the original ones by a magnitude. In this case I need to rely on Adobe. – Uwe Ziegenhagen Feb 13 '12 at 06:21
  • Zoom in very far using Adobe Reader. Is the text vectorized or "bitmapped"? – Ben Feb 13 '12 at 12:43