Viewing Postscript (or PDF) on OS X: Aliasing issues
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mankoff
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Published on 2011-02-16T22:57:16Z
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2011/02/16
23:27 UTC
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I am generating postscript graphics and am trying to find a balance between non-aliasing and over-aliasing.
If I use the raw ghostscript viewer gs
on the Postscript, it looks good. The text appears anti-aliased, but the image remains nice and blocky. Unfortunately, gs
has no real user interface and loses all of the nice things that Preview.app
has. I could install gv
, but the dependency bloat is huge! It requires all of gnome
. And even that isn't a great viewer compared to Preview.app
or Skim.app
. Here is an image viewed with gs
:
From a user-interaction and Mac-ish perspective, Preview.app
(or Skim.app
is a much nicer program to use. They have the option to turn on or off aliasing, but neither option looks very good. Which aliasing on, the image is blurry. When it is off, the graphic matches what is seen from gs
, but there are two issues.
- Minor issue: the font is ugly. Uglier than with
gs
. - Major issue: Every PDF is un-aliased, making it hard to read regular PDFs full of text.
So, in summary:
- Is there a way to manually generate the PDF from the PS that overcomes these issues?
- Is there a way to find a middle ground of alias/unalias with
Preview.app
? - Is there another app that displays with quality like
gs
, but has a decent UI likeSkim.app
orPreview.app
- Is there a way to have
Preview.app
turn off aliasing for only one file (containing graphics) but leave it enabled in general so that text PDFs are still readable?
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