Converting old PS files (generated with LaTeX) to searchable PDFs

pkfix fasc3a.ps fasc3a-fix.ps
ps2pdf fasc3a-fix.ps

A common (or at least, more common than it should be) scenario: you find a PostScript file of some paper, clearly written in (La)TeX, but which looks blurry on screen and you cannot copy any text. Converting to PDF with, say, ps2pdf does not help either. You curse the .ps format, and put up with the blurriness or print it out (where it looks fine) to read it.

Turns out it doesn’t have to be this way. The problem is that the PS file is using bitmap fonts, but assuming you have the scalable (Type 1) versions of those same fonts on your system, you can convert the fonts! There’s a script called pkfix, distributed with TeX Live, which will take a ps file that uses bitmap fonts and try to convert it to use scalable fonts. Just run it as

pkfix inputfile.ps outputfile.ps

This should produce a PS which isn’t blurry and is searchable, but if you prefer PDF, the usual way will work

ps2pdf outputfile.ps

or on Mac OS X if you don’t have ps2pdf for some reason, o inputfile.ps -a macps2pdf where macps2pdf comes with MacGhostView.

If the file is very old (generated with dvips from before 1996) and pkfix doesn’t work, there’s a further script called pkfix-helper that may make the file appropriate for pkfix.

BTW, if it’s your own files that are coming out blurry, something is wrong with your setup. Just install the package cm-super from CTAN—sudo tlmgr install cm-super or whatever—and no other change is needed. Or you can use the lmodern fonts with \usepackage{lmodern}, but that shouldn’t be necessary.