The Testflow Homepage

Overview

Testflow is a diagnostic for testing LaTeX to PS/PDF print workflow. You can use it to check your LaTeX/dvips/pdfTeX system and printing setup.

The most recent version of Testflow is v1.1, which was released on January 10, 2007.

The changes over the previous release (v1.0) include:

See the testflow_doc.pdf file for complete documentation. Enjoy!

Obtaining Testflow

Testflow can be obtained at:
CTAN (The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network)
CTAN carries the complete testflow package.

Errata

The ps2pdf of Ghostscript 8.60 (August 2007), differs slightly from previous versions in that the PDF level is specified in an environment variable. Thus, any modifications to this script will be slightly different. e.g., 

#!/bin/sh
# Convert PostScript to PDF using LaTeX recommended parameters.

# Currently, we produce PDF 1.4 by default, but this is not guaranteed
# not to change in the future.
version=14

ps2pdf="`dirname $0`/ps2pdf$version"
if test ! -x "$ps2pdf"; then
        ps2pdf="ps2pdf$version"
fi
exec "$ps2pdf" -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true "$@"

As of version 8.62 (February 2008) of Ghostscript, the URW fonts are no longer distributed separately and the Ghostscript packages (including the Unix version) now comes with the latest versions of these fonts. Updating Ghostscript will automatically update the URW fonts as well. The URW font distribution URLs mentioned in the testflow documentation are no longer valid.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: On my Unix system, the Palatino/Palladio fonts appear "crooked" for some magnifications of my PDF document. The problem does not seem to occur when printing. What is wrong?

The URW fonts that were distributed with Unix packages of Ghostscript prior to version 8.62 contained errors in the hinting of the Palatino/Palladio fonts. To fix this, upgrade to Ghostscript version 8.62 or later. MS Windows versions of the Ghostscript fonts did not have this problem.

Q: Why can't I find the entries for the map files in my configuration files?

Starting with teTeX 2.0 (Unix systems) and MiKTeX 2.4 (MS Windows), the map files for all of the major TeX applications (e.g., dvips, pdftex, etc.) are managed by an updmap utility which is controlled by the contents of <texmf>/web2c/updmap.cfg. Make sure your updmap.cfg has: 

dvipsPreferOutline true
LW35 URWkb
dvipsDownloadBase35 false
pdftexDownloadBase14 true
dvipdfmDownloadBase14 true

MixedMap bsr.map
MixedMap bsr-interpolated.map

Then, run updmap for teTeX 2.0 or MiKTeX systems (or updmap-sys to make the changes take effect system-wide for teTeX 3.0 systems as updmap does under teTeX 2.0). Note that the MIKTeX user guide recommends that updmap.cfg be edited using an application provided for this purpose: initexmf --edit-config-file updmap. For MiKTeX systems there is also an option to update the map files with the GUI configuration tool.

Q: Why don't my changes to pdfTeX's configuration have any effect?

For teTeX 2.0 and MiKTeX 2.4 and later systems, you have to rebuild the format files for the changes to take effect. For teTeX 2.0 and later, make the desired changes to <texmf>/tex/generic/pdftex/pdftexconfig.tex and then run fmtutil --all (or fmtutil-sys --all for a system-wide update under teTeX 3.0). For MiKTeX 2.4 and later make the desired changes to <texmf>/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg (note that the MIKTeX user guide recommends that pdftex.cfg be edited using an application provided for this purpose: initexmf --edit-config-file pdftex) and then run initexmf --dump to rebuild the format files (or use the GUI configuration tool).

Q: When running ps2pdf, I get a warning message "Set UseCUEColor for UseDeviceIndependentColor to work properly." or "Set UseCIEColor for UseDeviceIndependentColor to work properly." What's up with that?

This issue started with Ghostscript version 8.54 in which the warning message contained a typo "UseCUEColor", which was later corrected to read "UseCIEColor" in version 8.60. The warning message, which for most users is harmless, only appears when using the -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer option. One way to work around the problem is to add the Ghostscript option -dUseCIEColor=true to your ps2pdf script. However, in my tests, doing so slows down ps2pdf processing and results in a larger file size as the PDF output will contain ICC profiles to facilitate color management and conversion between devices. In earlier versions of Ghostscript the processing slowdown was very significant (an order of magnitude), but this seems to have been fixed by 8.63 (probably around version 8.60) with the slowdown being much more modest (on the order of a factor of two). Perhaps a better approach (unless you know you need ICC profiles) is to use -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress instead of -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer (the former option offers high quality output like the latter, but does not create ICC profiles).

Q: I use a GUI rather than a command shell to run LaTeX and so I cannot see prompts for input. How do I specify a paper size when compiling testflow.tex?

For shame. ;) At the start of the testflow.tex source code are definitions that have been commented out: 

% *** paper size (choose one) ***
%\def\papertype{letterpaper}
%\def\papertype{a4paper}
%
% *** duplex page test (choose one) ***
%\def\makeduplexpage{yes}
%\def\makeduplexpage{no}

Uncomment two (one for each question) choices from the two types of options: 

% *** paper size (choose one) ***
\def\papertype{letterpaper}
%\def\papertype{a4paper}
%
% *** duplex page test (choose one) ***
\def\makeduplexpage{yes}
%\def\makeduplexpage{no}

and testflow.tex will use those choices without prompting the user on the console.

Obtaining Support

You can obtain support for Testflow from:

The Usenet newsgroup comp.text.tex
This the primary means of support for LaTeX and dvips related issues.
You can contact me via the email address(es) at my contact page.
Please use this option only for packages that I maintain (not general help with LaTeX).