How to Create PDF from LATEX

Ki-Joo Kim∗

Version 0.1
April 4, 2003

Abstract
This document describes how to create high quality PDF from LATEX sources and provides some valuable tips.

Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 General Intro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Font Issues for Best PDF Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 ps2pdf: From PS to PDF 2

3 dvipdfm: From DVI to PDF 2

3.1 General Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3.2 hyperref Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

4 pdfLATEX: From LATEX to PDF 3

4.1 General Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4.2 hyperref Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4.3 Color and Graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4.4 PDF Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4.5 PDF Annotation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

5 hyperref Package 5
5.1 General Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.2 Bookmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.2.1 Bookmark Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.2.2 How to Add Bookmarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2.3 Math Titles: • a2 + b2 = c2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.3 WWW Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.4 Internal Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
∗ mailto:kim_dot_ki-joo_at_epa_dot_gov
1. Introduction 2

5.5 Acrobat Reader Menu Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

5.6 hyperref to Bibliography Entries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.7 hyperref to Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

6 Additional PDF Topics 9

6.1 PDF Slides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2 PDF Merge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.3 Get “Acrobat Reader” Icon and Link . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.4 PDF with Java Script – I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.5 PDF with Java Script – II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

7 Useful Links 10

8 Note 10

1 Introduction
1.1 General Intro
You can create a postscript file and convert it to PDF using

• ps2pdf converts PS to PDF version 1.3 (Adobe 4.x compatible) ⇒ Section 2.

• dvipdfm. This converts DVI to PDF version 1.2 (Adobe 3.x compatible) and can automatically convert EPS
figures to PDF figures ⇒ Section 3.
• pdflatex directly produces PDF version 1.4 (Adobe 5.x compatible) ⇒ Section 4.

You can also add PDF information, WWW links, internal links, cross-references, bookmarks, and more using the
famous hyperref package that is described in Section 5.
Since PDF is already compressed, do not try to zip PDF.

1.2 Font Issues for Best PDF Output

Since PDF has a limited selection of Type 1 fonts, LATEX fonts that you are using are very important in high quality
PDF generation. If you use CM (computer modern) font and ps2pdf, you should use dvips -P pdf -G0 to get PS.
For significantly smaller, better quality PDF you would better use one of following LATEX packages for Type 1
fonts:

\usepackage{mathptmx} - Times + Helvetica + Courier + Times Math

\usepackage{mathpazo} - Palatino + Helvetica + Courier + Palatino Math
\usepackage{newcent} - New Century Schoolbook + Avant Garde + Courier
\usepackage{bookman} - Bookman + Avant Garde + Courier

mathptmx and mathpazo replace times and palatino packages, respectively. Since Helvetica and Avant Garde
are slightly bigger than the Times and Palatino, you may also load \usepackage[scaled=0.92]{helvet} after
mathptmx or mathpazo packages. These packages, parts of PSNFSS collection, are already included in your LATEX
system.
4. pdfLATEX: From LATEX to PDF 3

Alternatively you can use txfonts for Times text and math or pxfonts for Palatino text and math. Math symbols
in these packages are more comprehensive than the equivalent PSNFSS collections. If you choose full installation of
MiKTEX 2.2, you are ready to use these beautiful fonts.

2 ps2pdf: From PS to PDF

Any output of dvips may (in principle) be converted to PDF, using either ps2pdf in Ghostscript or Adobe distiller,
but the results can be pretty poor if certain simple precautions are omitted especially when you use CM fonts. For the
best result from dvips use Type1 fonts in LATEX and use dvips -Ppdf -G0 filename.
If you use distiller, make sure you configure the distiller to the “Subset fonts below 100%” option. This will ensure
that only fonts for which 100% of all characters are used in the document are included completely and the distiller will
remove font data for all unused characters from your PDF file. This will keep your PDF files small.
Unexpectedly you can also use hyperref package (see Section 5). The general form is

\documentclass[dvips]{article}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphics,color}
\usepackage[dvips,colorlinks]{hyperref}

But in this case you would better to use dvipdfm or pdflatex.

3 dvipdfm: From DVI to PDF

3.1 General Usage
To use dvipdfm begin your document with

\documentclass[dvipdfm]{article}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx,color}
\usepackage[dvipdfm,colorlinks]{hyperref}

and then type latex file.tex (may be several times) and then dvipdfm file.dvi. One of the advantages of
dvipdfm is to internally handle EPS files, so you do not need to convert them to PDF figure files as in pdfLATEX.

3.2 hyperref Package

By using the hyperref package with dvipdfm you automatically get PDF files with bookmarks (if you have a table
of contents) and cross-references etc. See Section 5.

4 pdfLATEX: From LATEX to PDF

4.1 General Usage
To use pdflatex, begin your document with
4. pdfLATEX: From LATEX to PDF 4

Figure 1: Figure insertion from EPS to PDF conversion using epstopdf.

\documentclass[pdftex]{article}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx,color}
\usepackage[pdftex,colorlinks]{hyperref}

and then type pdflatex file.tex (may be several times) to produce file.pdf.

4.2 hyperref Package

By using the hyperref package with pdfLATEX you automatically get PDF files with bookmarks (if you have a table of
contents) and cross-references etc. See Section 5.

4.3 Color and Graphics

The standard color and graphicx packages have pdfTEX options too which are activated by adding pdftex to the
document class options. JPEG, TIFF and PNG graphics inclusion is supported.
To deal with a document that has EPS graphics:

• Use epstopdf package to convert EPS docs to PDF docs on demand. It needs to be loaded after \usepackage[pdftex]{graphi
• Use the epstopdf program manually to convert the EPS figures to PDF figures. Ensure that you don’t mention
the filename’s suffix in the \includegraphics commands. Add pdftex to the options in the document class
line when you run pdflatex, remove it when you run latex, or
• Use the unpsfrag command (available from http://www.gts.tsc.uvigo.es/˜fiz/unpsfrag) to convert
a LATEX document that uses the psfrag into one that doesn’t, thus letting you use pdflatex.

Figure 1 is a PDF figure converted from EPS using the epstopdf program. There is no need to calculate bounding
box information using ebb.exe.

4.4 PDF Information

Add somewhere near the beginning of a TEX or LATEX document code like:
4. pdfLATEX: From LATEX to PDF 5

\special{! [ /Author ()
/Title ()
/Keywords ()
/DOCINFO pdfmark}

to store the author, title, and keywords in the PDF file automatically (Note that the pdfmark command is understood
only by Adobe distiller). If you are using pdfLATEX, you can also include this information into the produced PDF file
by adding:

\pdfinfo{ % Info dictionary of PDF output;

% all keys are optional.
/Author (Han The Thanh)
/CreationDate (D:20000012000000) % D:YYYYMMDDhhmmss (default: the actual date)
/ModDate (D:20000012000000) % ModDate is similar
/Creator (TeX) % default: "TeX"
/Producer (pdfTeX) % default: "pdfTeX" + pdftex version
/Title (example.pdf) %
/Subject (Example) %
/Keywords (PDF TeX) %
}

A better approach under LATEX is to use the hyperref package. See Section 5.

4.5 PDF Annotation

[The first three examples in this section is taken from the samplepdf.pdf file in your \texmf\doc\pdftex\samplepdf.]
This annotation (only on the screen) is created using the following generic annotation.

\pdfannot % generic annotation

width 10cm % the dimension of the annotation can be controlled
height 0cm % via <rule spec>; if some of dimensions in
depth 4cm % <rule spec> is not given, the corresponding
% value of the parent box will be used.
{ %
/Subtype /Text % text annotation
% /Open true % if given then the text annotation will be opened
/Contents % text contents
(Hello, there! Can you see me? ˆ_ˆ)
}%

To see the content click the right mouse button on this figure. You can also move this text icon using your mouse.
You can also play sound and movie files in your PDF (You need Apple Quick Time Movie Player). See the
following example:

\leftline{%
\pdfannot width 4in height 0in depth 3in {%
/Subtype /Movie
5. hyperref Package 6

/Movie << /F (MovieFile.mov) >>}

An example of movie annotation
}%
\leftline{%
\pdfannot width 0in height 0in depth 0in {%
/Subtype /Movie
/Movie << /F (SoundFile.wav) >>}
Sound can be also embedded using Movie annotation
}%

To include AVI files you can use the following command in the preamble:

\newcommand{\video}[5]{%
\vspace{#3}\hspace{#2}{\pdfannot width #4 height #5 depth 0cm {%
/Subtype /Movie /C [1 0 0] /Border [0 0 3] /Movie
<> }}}

and \video{g.avi}{4cm}{12cm}{12cm}{12cm} where the first argument is the name of the file, and the 2nd and
3rd control the location of one corner, and 4th and 5th the width and height of the box. You can control the color of
the frame and thickness by modifying /Border.

5 hyperref Package
By using the hyperref package with dvipdfm or pdflatex, you automatically get PDF files with bookmarks (if you
have a table of contents) and cross-references etc.

5.1 General Usage

\usepackage[dvips or dvipdfm or pdftex]{article}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx,color}
\usepackage[dvipdfm or pdftex,colorlinks]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{%
pdftitle={How to Create PDF from LaTeX},
pdfauthor={Ki-Joo Kim},
pdfkeywords={pdf, latex, tex, ps2pdf, dvipdfm, pdflatex},
bookmarksnumbered,
pdfstartview={FitH},
urlcolor=cyan,
}%

There is a golden rule that the hyperref package should be loaded as the last package, except when using sidewaysfigures.
Some additional options are:

• breaklinks=true: Allows link text to break across lines (defalut=false).

5. hyperref Package 7

• colorlinks=true: Colors the text of links and anchors. The colors chosen depend on the type of link. At present
the only types of link distinguished are citations, page references, URLs, local file references, and other links
(default=false).
• linkcolor=red: Color for normal internal links.
• anchorcolor=black: Color for anchor text.
• citecolor=green: Color for bibliographical citations in text.
• filecolor=magenta: Color for URLs which open local files.
• menucolor=red: Color for Acrobat menu items.
• pagecolor=red: Color for links to other pages
• urlcolor=cyan: Color for linked URLs.
• pdfstartview={FitB}: Set the startup page view.
– FitH : Fit whole width of page
– FitV : Fit whole height of page
– FitB : Fit whole ”Bounding Box” page
– FitBH: Fit whole width of ”Bounding Box” of page
– FitBV: Fit whole height of ”Bounding Box” of page
• pdfpagescrop={53 486 389 754}: Tells hyperref to leave cropping commands in the DVI and PDF. By cropping
you can significantly increase screen display size of PDF.

5.2 Bookmark
5.2.1 Bookmark Options
The following options (with using \hypersetup) affect bookmarks:
• bookmarks: Make bookmarks (Default: true). This option cannot be used after package has been loaded.
• bookmarksnumbered: Put section numbers in bookmarks (Default: false).
• bookmarksopen=true: Open up the bookmark tree (Default: false).
• bookmarksopenlevel: Level to which bookmarks are open (Default: \maxdimen).
• bookmarkstype: To specify which toc file to mimic (Default: toc).
• pdfpagemode: How document starts when opened (Default: None):
– None: Neither bookmarks nor thumbnails are visible.
– UseOutlines: Bookmarks are visible.
– UseThumbs: Thumbnails are visible.
– FullScreen: Full-screen mode without bars, outlines, and thumbnails.
• unicode: Creating Unicode bookmarks (Default: false). After package has been loaded, it switches between
Unicode and PDFDocEncoding.
When creating bookmarks hyperref writes them into the file filename.out. At the second run the bookmarks
are set.

5.2.2 How to Add Bookmarks

Starred chapter and section headings are not inserted in the table of contents, and thus nor in the bookmark. For manual
addition of bookmark,
5. hyperref Package 8

\pdfbookmark[level]{bookmark text}{anchor name}

where level is 0 for chapter, 1 for section, 2 for subsection, and so on. Of course, -1 is for part.

5.2.3 Math Titles: • a2 + b2 = c2

[This section is taken from AcroTEX.]
Sometimes it is desired to have mathematics in the title of a section. Such a title does not translate to PDFDocEn-
coding automatically. In this case, use\texorpdfstring{Body title}{Bookmark title}} to offer alternative
for your bookmarks. Here is how the section title is generated:

\subsubsection{Math Titles: %
\texorpdfstring{$\bullet\ aˆ2+bˆ2=cˆ2$}%
{\textbullet\ a\texttwosuperior\ + b\texttwosuperior\ = c\texttwosuperior}%
}

A complete listing of these text commands can be obtained by LATEXing the hyperref.dtx.

5.3 WWW Links

The hyperref package has several ways of defining www links. The command \url{URL} can be used to state and
link a URL in the text.

\url{http://www.ctan.org/}
\url{ftp://ftp.gnu.org/}
\url{mailto:[email protected]}

A more sophisticated way of www links provides the command \href{URL}{text} where URL is the address and
text is the text displayed in the document. For example, The MikTEX site. To include the graphics with a hypertext
link, use\href{URL}{fig filename}.
The www links in PDF will be in a cyan-colored box (default), but will be changed to magenta texts when the
colorlinks option is loaded as in this document.

5.4 Internal Links

\hypertarget{target name}{text1} creates an internal link target while \hyperlink{target name}{text2}
creates an internal link. You can also link external targets. See the xr packages that comes with the hyperref
package.1
The hyper links in PDF will be in a red-colored box (default), but will be changed to red texts when the colorlinks
option is loaded as in this document.

5.5 Acrobat Reader Menu Control

You can also access the menu of Acrobat Reader by using \Acrobatmenu{menuoption}{text}. If you want to see
the document information of this PDF, click here .
For more menu options, refer to Hyper man.pdf (by Sebastian Rahtz) in your \texmf\doc tree.
1 LAT
EX also has its own xr package. In this case disable this one.
6. Additional PDF Topics 9

5.6 hyperref to Bibliography Entries

The hyperrefs in a PDF file, which point to bib-entries are not correct. Write in latex preamble:

\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Bibliography}
\chapter*{\bibname
\@mkboth{\MakeUppercase\bibname}{\MakeUppercase\bibname}}%
\list{\@biblabel{\@arabic\c@enumiv}}%
{\settowidth\labelwidth{\@biblabel{#1}}%
\leftmargin\labelwidth
\advance\leftmargin\labelsep
\@openbib@code
\usecounter{enumiv}%
\let\p@enumiv\@empty
\renewcommand\theenumiv{\@arabic\c@enumiv}}%
\sloppy
\clubpenalty4000
\@clubpenalty \clubpenalty
\widowpenalty4000%
\sfcode‘\.\@m}
{\def\@noitemerr
{\@latex@warning{Empty ‘thebibliography’ environment}}%
\endlist}

5.7 hyperref to Index

Write just before you insert lists of indices:

\clearpage
\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Index}

It maybe a good idea to write in preamble

\providecommand*{\phantomsection}{}

than you do not get an error message when disabling the use of hyperref.

6 Additional PDF Topics

6.1 PDF Slides
If you want to produce presentations from LATEX, the prosper (http://prosper.sourceforge.net)package is
useful.
6. Additional PDF Topics 10

6.2 PDF Merge

A good shareware program is PDCAT (http://www.glance.ch) for Win32 and Unix systems. PDCAT is a com-
mand line tool for concatenating PDF files. It also features a variety of modification or enhancement functions like
adding a background or logo to each page of an input file, adding hyper links and bookmarks, and so on.
Another method is to use pdfpages package. For example

\usepackage{pdfpages}
...
\includepdf[pages={1-10}, nup=2, scale=1.0]{imsi.pdf}

Pages of 1-10 of imsi.pdf is inserted as 2 ups into the current position. But remember that the pdfpages package
only works with pdfLATEX.

6.3 Get “Acrobat Reader” Icon and Link

The following HTML fragment creates a link like this to the appropriate page.

<a href="http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html"
target="_blank"><img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/getacro.gif"
width=88 height=31 border=0 alt="ACROBAT READER"></a>

6.4 PDF with Java Script – I

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\pdfobj stream {%
var d = new Date();
var d1 = util.scand("mm/dd/yy", "1/22/03");
if((d1.valueOf() - d.valueOf()) < 0){
app.alert("Document expired! Please get a new version from Ki-Joo");
}
this.gotoNamedDest("page.2");
this.zoomType = zoomtype.fitP;
} \edef\ExpWarnObj{\the\pdflastobj} \pdfrefobj\ExpWarnObj

\usepackage[pdfstartview={}]{hyperref}
\pdfcatalog{}
openaction
user {<< /S /JavaScript /JS \ExpWarnObj\space 0 R >>}

\begin{document}
test\newpage page 2
\end{document}
8. Note 11

6.5 PDF with Java Script – II

Another option is to use insDLJS package developed by D.P. Story (developer of AcroTEX). This package defines a
new environment, insDLJS, used for inserting Java Script into a PDF file created from a LATEX source. This package
works correctly for users of pdftex or dvipdfm. For those that use the Acrobat Distiller (specifically, those that use
either dvips or dripstone to produce a postscript file, which is then distilled), you are required to have Acrobat 5.0 (or
later).
The following is a quick illustration of the use of the new environment.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[pdftex]{hyperref}
\usepackage[pdftex]{insdljs}

\newcommand\tugHello{Welcome to TUG 2001!}

\begin{insDLJS}[HelloWorld]{mydljs}{My Private DLJS}
function HelloWorld() { app.alert("\tugHello", 3); }
\end{insDLJS}

\begin{document}
\begin{Form} % needed for \PushButton
\section{Test of the \texttt{insDLJS} Package}
% use built in form button of hyperref
Push \PushButton[name=myButton, onclick={HelloWorld();}]{Button}
\end{Form}
\end{document}

7 Useful Links
• Effective Scientific Electronic Publishing (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/˜mgk25/publ-tips.html).
• Producing HTML and PDF files with LATEX (http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/
makingWWWdocs.html).
• Using LATEXto Create Quality PDF Documents over the World Wide Web (http://www.math.uakron.edu/
˜dpstory/latx2pdf.html).
• AcroTeX (by D.P.Story) (http://www.math.uakron.edu/˜dpstory/acrotex.html).

8 Note
If you find any errors or have suggestions, please let me know. My personal web page is http://www.geocities.
com/kijoo2000.