CentOS - Mar 2008 - pdflatex: fuzzy fonts in Evince, but not on paper output

Hi,

I've been using LaTeX for a few years on Mac OS X, and I'd like to use 
it on CentOS now. I installed a complete environment using 'yum 
groupinstall "Authoring and Publishing"' and then installing
tetex-xdvi,
plus manually installing the 'memoir' class.

I can run 'latex document.tex' ok: the resulting .dvi looks nice in 
xdvi. When running 'dvips -o document.dvi', I get a .ps file that I can 
view OK in Evince.

But when I run 'pdflatex document.tex', the fonts in the resulting PDF 
are all ragged and fuzzy... though the print output is OK.

I thought I'd rather post this question here, since the answer is 
probably distribution-specific.

Any suggestions?

Niki

On Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:20:44 +0100
Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net> wrote:
> But when I run 'pdflatex document.tex', the fonts in the resulting
PDF
> are all ragged and fuzzy... though the print output is OK.
What are you using to view the pdf with?  Have you tried viewing it with
something else?

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Niki Kovacs wrote:
> I can run 'latex document.tex' ok: the resulting .dvi looks 
> nice in xdvi. When running 'dvips -o document.dvi', I get a 
> .ps file that I can view OK in Evince.
>
> But when I run 'pdflatex document.tex', the fonts in the 
> resulting PDF are all ragged and fuzzy... though the print 
> output is OK.
known issue;  using a similar creation chain, see the xpdf 
(left) and Evince (right) rendering of the same file:
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=291595
> I thought I'd rather post this question here, since the 
> answer is probably distribution-specific.
I filed a bug upstream, as Evince is a poor second to xpdf. 
See:
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=428677

CentOS 5 carries an older version:

$ rpm -q evince
evince-0.6.0-8.el5

I see at the prime upstrream site at the Gnome project:
    http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/evince/2.21/
LATEST-IS-2.21.91              11-Feb-2008

Sadly there is no embeded .spec file for easy building

RawHide at Red Hat carries it, but it has a hard dependency 
chain as packaged for C5, without some major build environment 
surgery

[herrold at centos-5 evince]$ rpmbuild --rebuild evince-2.21.91-2.fc9.src.rpm
Installing evince-2.21.91-2.fc9.src.rpm
error: Failed build dependencies:
         glib2-devel >= 2.15.0 is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         poppler-glib-devel >= 0.5.9 is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         nautilus-devel is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         libspectre-devel is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         gnome-doc-utils is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         gnome-icon-theme >= 2.17.1 is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         kpathsea-devel is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
         djvulibre-devel is needed by evince-2.21.91-2.x86_64
[herrold at centos-5 evince]$

Trying the tarball route, I get a roadblock in the pkgconfig 
phase of the ./configure

configure: error: gnome-doc-utils >= 0.3.2 not found

from this line:

configure:gdu_cv_version_required=0.3.2

Short circuiting that, I get:

checking for LIB... configure: error: Package requirements 
(gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10.0 libxml-2.0 >= 2.5.0 gio-2.0 >= 2.15.4) 
were not met:

As I say, major surgery.


I don't understand the mindset of 'latest and greatest 
featuritis', and REALLY don't understand the urge to huge 'one 
monolithic tool to do much' as it is so contrary and hostile 
to the 'nix "small competent tools" history of a classical 
UNIX environment, but it is the way of the world ;(

I use xpdf, as a result, and find that it works very well, as 
always.

-- Russ herrold