Re: [Groff] conversion to DOC format

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 01:17 p.m. 04/08/2004, Roger Leigh wrote:
> M Bianchi <address@hidden> writes:
>
> >> From: Dean Allen Provins <address@hidden>
> >> Subject: [Groff] conversion to DOC format
> >>      :
> >> Many firms or government agencies require cover letters and resumes in
> >> Microsoft Word (i.e. .DOC) format.  Alas groff doesn't generate this ...
> >
> > What I do is to create a PostScript (*.ps) formatted output and then use
> >  ps2pdf(1)  to create a Portable Document Format (PDF) file.
>
> I also do this.  However, I noticed that it often messes up the
> character spacing, particularly where ligatures or special characters
> are concerned.  As an example, turn groff_char(7) into ps, and then to
> pdf; you'll see the resultant PDF has many alignment problems :-(
>
> This is the case with groff 1.18.1 and ps2pdf/gs 7.07.1 (Debian).

The problem is GS.

(1) The 7.x series (both AFPL and GNU) have a rather botched pdfwriter. I'm 
using the AFPL 8.30 beta (a recent CVS snapshot) and it is working much, 
much better; you may want to try out GNU GS 8.01 which should be in Debían 
unstable.

.RANT
(2) The "URW-Cyrillic" fonts used by recent GS8 versions and used by most 
Linux distros are a piece of ... WEll, I wouldn't dirt the city dump with 
those. The people doing those abominations: (a) didn't have the decency of 
changing the font names and (b) managed to destroy high quality fonts 
through the unenlightened misuse of a defective font editor (as a 
three-year-old Pfaedit would be) and thorough misunderstanding of font 
metrics and postscript hinting. Try replacing them with the GS6 URW fonts 
(available at any CTAN near you); if you need the extended character set 
for some reason, then grab a copy of the latest (and better quality, 
Fontforge is going places) versions at ftp://ftp.gnome.ru/fonts/urw/release/
.ENDRANT

For Dean: you may want to examine pdftoword from http://www.verypdf.com/ 
(Really it should be called pdftortf, but most of us Windows users lack the 
wits to link dot A to dot B :-). The thing is weird stuff, while it is a 
shareware (nagware with timeouts), they actually license it under the 
GPL!!! You can download the source code and compile it with an X11 
graphical interface (though you do have to write your own Makefile and 
figure out the correct linking order ;-).