The sources for these PDF files were written in AmS-TeX, where AMS stands for the American Mathematical Society (see American Mathematical Society: Mathematics Research and Scholarship), and TeX (see TeX Users Group (TUG) home page) is the scientific typesetting system designed by Donald Knuth (see Don Knuth's Home Page). Fedora Core Linux (see Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat) operating system was used in all computer processing of these files. More about Linux can be read at Linux International; current Linux news can be read at Linux Today - Linux News On Internet Time.. The Perl programming language (see Perl Mongers) was used extensively in processing files in producing the AmS-TeX source files and the resulting PDF output.
There are known issued involved in producing PDF output from TeX sources. The main issue is that the command dvips normally produces Type 3 PostScript fonts, but these are not properly supported by the current Acroread pdf reader, and when viewing these files with Acroread the fonts look jagged. Xpdf does not support Type 3 PostScript fonts at all, so files containing Type 3 PostScript fonts cannot be viewed by Xpdf at all. There is no problem when viewing files containing Type 3 PostScript fonts with Ghostview.
To avoid these problems, one needs to produce PDF files with Type 1 PostScript fonts. The site PDF Output from LaTeX, among others, recommends the following commands (in Linux or Unix) to do this:
tex myfile dvips -Ppdf -G0 myfile.dvi -o myfile.ps ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.2 \ -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true myfile.psThis works most of the time, but in the output they produce, the small superscripts formula in Problem 6 of the Junior Exam of 2003 are not rendered properly in Acroread unless one uses a magnification of at least 200 %; Ghostview and Xpdf work properly. Interestingly, even Acroread works properly in rendering exactly the same formula at 100% of magnification, produced from the same TeX source, when viewing the solutions to the problems on both exams. In order to make even Acroread work correctly even on the Junior Exam of 2003, the commands
tex myfile pdftex myfilewere used to produce all pdf files, using version
pdfTeX (Web2C 7.3.1) 3.14159-0.13d kpathsea version 3.3.1This version of pdfTeX is beta software, and we have experienced problems with it on certain complicated TeX files. It did produce a correct output for the pdf files mentioned here.
Last updated:
Tue Mar 13 18:50:18 EDT 2007.