Creating a PDF File from a LATEX Thesis

Rensselaer requires that electronically-submitted theses or dissertations be in Adobe Portable Document Format. Your PDF files must have all fonts embedded, be text-searchable, and must not be
encrypted. The resolution should be at least 600 dpi. You will need to submit two PDF files.
File 1: A PDF file containing the complete thesis or dissertation.
File 2: A PDF file consisting of the special abstract title page and the abstract. Note that the
abstract title page is not the same as the title page for the thesis or dissertation. This is required
for both masters and doctoral candidates.

Overview

Be sure to use the Rensselaer LATEX thesis class. For information, see the Help Desk page, How to
Prepare your Thesis using LaTeX. Once you have completed your thesis, its easy to convert it to
PDF. There are two widely-used methods, each producing excellent results:
1. The simpler method is to use the relatively recent program pdfLATEX, which converts your
LATEX file directly to PDF. On Windows systems, your editor/shell (e.g., WinShell, WinEdt)
has a button on the menu bar for this; on unix1 /Linux systems, you can use pdflatex on
the command line. For this method, included graphics files can be PNG (Portable Network
Graphics), JPG, or PDF, but not EPS.
2. The traditional way is to create a PostScript file first and then convert that to PDF. To do
this, you run LATEX, then dvips. On Windows, you then open the .ps file with GSView and
use menu items to convert to PDF; on unix1 /Linux systems, you run the ps2pdf program
(part of ghostscript) instead of using GSView. Be sure your ghostscript is version 8.15 or
later. Included graphics files must be in EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format.
If you want to be able to switch between using LATEX and pdfLATEX without changing your file, you
need to keep your graphics in two formats: EPS and one of the others. Then in your .tex file, dont
include the filename extension in your \includegraphics commands. LATEX will assume EPS and
pdfLATEX will look for JPG, PNG or PDF files matching the name.

Making PDF using pdfLATEX

If your tex/latex implementation is fairly recent (within the last two or three years), all fonts should
be embedded in the PDF file by default. See section 6 for instructions on checking the fonts.
On Windows, click the appropriate button on your editors toolbar to run pdfLATEX and create
your PDF file.
On unix systems, enter the command:
pdflatex myfile
(to generate myfile.pdf from myfile.tex)

Graphics note
If you have EPS figures in your document, you will need to convert them to PDF format before
running pdfLATEX. You can do this by running the epstopdf program from the command line (in
Windows, open a command window and cd to the appropriate folder):
epstopdf myfigure.eps
(to generate myfigure.pdf)
After doing this, you will have two files for your graphic, one eps and one pdf.
1
Do not use unix on RCS to create PDF from LATEX; the RCS versions of the programs described in this document
are not recent enough.

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February 2008

To convert all the .eps files in the current Windows folder, use the for-command:
for %i in (*.eps) do epstopdf %i
The unix equivalent is:
for fyle in *.eps ; do epstopdf $fyle ; done

(note the spaces around the ;s)

epstopdf should be on your system already. If not, you can download it from:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/epstopdf/

Making PDF using LATEX and dvips

If your ghostscript version is 8.15 or above and if you follow the instructions below, your PDF file
should be searchable and have all fonts embedded. See section 6 for instructions on checking the
fonts. (Note that if gs is earlier than 8.15, the resulting PDF file will look fine but will not be
completely searchable words containing ligatures, such as file or flame, will not be found.)
On Windows:
Click the LATEX button on your editors toolbar to create the DVI file, then click the dvips button
to create the PostScript file. If you have installed GSView and ghostscript (recommended), click
on the ghost icon to open GSView. Go to File -> Convert, then select pdfwrite. For the
Resolution, select 600 dpi. Now click on Properties, and make sure the following options are set:
Compatibility Level 1.4
PDFSETTINGS /printer
EmbedAllFonts true
SubsetFonts true
MaxSubsetPct 100 (You will have to type 100 in the Value box at the top; do not
select any of the other choices)
Its OK to leave the other values undefined.
Click on OK in the Convert window. Choose the destination file path and enter a file name with
the extension .pdf.
On unix systems:
Enter the following commands to generate myfile.pdf from myfile.tex:
latex myfile (generate myfile.dvi)
dvips -o myfile.ps myfile (generate myfile.ps)
ps2pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dEmbedAllFonts=true
-dSubsetFonts=true -dMaxSubsetPct=100 myfile.ps myfile.pdf (generate myfile.pdf)

Graphics note
For standard LATEX with dvips, included graphics files must be in Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)
format. However, if you have JPEG files, theres an easy way to convert. The jpeg2ps utility
converts JPEG images to compressed PostScript Level 2 or 3 files without uncompressing the
images. The JPEG data is simply wrapped with PostScript, which yields considerably smaller
PS files. Use it from the command line (both Windows and unix):
jpeg2ps -h image.jpg > image.eps
You may already have jpeg2ps on your system; if not, you can download it from:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/jpeg2ps/

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February 2008

Including hyperlinks

Both LATEX and pdfLATEX can use the hyperref package to place live links in the PDF file. By
including \usepackage{hyperref} as the last package in your preamble, you will automatically
get bookmarks corresponding to your sections, and hyperlinks from your tables of contents and
\cite and \ref references. The package has a number of options; some of the most useful are:
colorlinks makes the text of the link colored instead of framed with a box. Its also possible to
choose the color of the links with the linkcolor, urlcolor, and citecolor options.
plainpages=false distinguishes between frontmatter and mainmatter page numbers. With this
option, hyperref writes different anchors for pages ii and 2.
pdfpagelabels sets PDF page labels so that Acrobat Reader displays the page number as (say) ii
(4 of 40) rather than simply 4 of 40. plainpages=false and pdfpagelabels are usually
used together.
breaklinks allows a line break in a long link (such as a TOC entry). Works with pdfLATEX only.
linktocpage makes the page number, not the text, the link in TOC, LOF, and LOT. Its especially
useful if you use LATEX and dvips to get your PDF file, as this method cannot use breaklinks.
If you also have long URLs in the body of the thesis, the breakurl package can help. For
documentation, look on your system for the file breakurl.pdf.
The hyperref package also provides the command \url{URL} to link to a URL from the text,
for example: \url{http://www.ctan.org/} or \url{mailto:[email protected]}. The command
\href{URL}{text} provides a more sophisticated method, where URL is the address and text
is the text displayed in the document. For example, to avoid having the text mailto: appear in
the document, use \href{mailto:[email protected]}{[email protected]}.
Be sure to run LATEX or pdfLATEX twice to ensure correct hyperlinks.

Abbreviated example file:

[other \include commands for the remaining files] ...

\end{document}

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Creating the two Required PDF files

The steps below assume you are using the thesis template files, downloadable from the Rensselaer LATEX Thesis web page, and you have edited these files to provide your own information. If you havent changed the names of the template files, the root file will be named
rpithes.tex or, for a short thesis, rpithes-short.tex. The abstract titlepage file will be called
either abstitle-mas.tex or abstitle-phd.tex.
File 1. The complete thesis or dissertation:
To produce a PDF file containing your complete thesis, run either pdfLATEX or LATEX (as described
above in Sections 2 and 3) on the root file, rpithes.tex. The root file reads all your other files,
and the output will be the complete document. If your thesis is relatively short and you are using
the template file rpithes-short.tex, run pdfLATEX or LATEX on that file.
File 2. The abstract title page and abstract:
For a Ph.D., run pdfLATEX or LATEX on the file abstitle-phd.tex; for a masters thesis, run
pdfLATEX or LATEX on the file abstitle-mas.tex. In each case, the output will be the abstract
title page followed by the abstract.

Checking the PDF file

You should check your PDF file(s) to make sure that everything has converted properly. To do
so, open the PDF file in Acrobat and page through to visually make sure it looks right. To more
formally check your fonts, follow these steps:
1. Go to File -> Document Properties. Select the Fonts tab.
2. In the window that opens, you should see a list of fonts.
3. Verify that all are either Type 1 or TrueType fonts.
4. You should see Embedded Subset for all fonts.
5. Select OK to close the Font window.
You can conduct a second check of fonts as follows:
1. From the Advanced menu, click on Use Local Fonts to turn this option off (the check
mark should disappear).
2. Page through your PDF file to visually inspect each page as it would appear on another
computer without the same fonts as yours.
Finally, print a copy of your file (as described below) and verify that everything prints as expected.

Printing the PDF file

To print a PDF file, go to File -> Print... and select the printer. In the print window that
appears, there are two important steps:
1. Make sure that Page Scaling is set to None. This is important to ensure correct margins.
2. To mininize the possibility of printing problems, click the Advanced button in the lower left
corner. A second dialog box will appear. In this window:
Be sure the Print as Image box is NOT checked.*
Make sure PostScript Options is selected, then:
In the drop-down box for Font and Resource Policy, select Send for each Page.
Click OK to close the dialog box and click OK again to print the document.
*If you still encounter printing problems, as a last resort you can select the Print as Image box.
This will result in a huge file that can take a very long time to print.
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