Portable Document Format (PDF) files are useful because they typically have small file sizes (especially compared with Postscript (PS) files), and most web browsers have an Adobe Acrobat reader plug-in installed. Thus, PDF files are very web-friendly, and are an excellent format for your papers that you put on the internet.

If you have a LaTeX document, after you run LaTeX on your paper, it will generate a .dvi file. You can then convert the .dvi file to Postscript by using the command "dvips". If you then attempt to generate a PDF file using "ps2pdf" or Adobe Acrobat Distiller, the text will look terrible. The reason is that LaTeX uses CM fonts, which cause problems in the PDF conversion.

There are a couple of methods to solve this problem. Here are a few:

1. On some installations of LaTeX, you can use the -Ppdf switch with "dvips", which forces the Postscript file to use fonts that are more friendly for the PDF conversion. For example, after running LaTeX on your document "paper.tex", if you use the command "dvips -Ppdf -G0 paper.dvi", the Postscript file that will be generated can then be converted to a good looking PDF file. The "-G0" option helps with the character encoding. On some installations, leaving it out will cause every occurence of "fi" in your document to be replaced with the British currency symbol. Not all installations of LaTeX support this option. The full installation of MikTeX 2.0 does support this option.
2. Another option is to force LaTeX to use a Times Roman Font, which is good for PDF generation. To do this, put the line "\usepackage{times}" at the top of your LaTeX source. The fonts in the PDF file that you generate should look much better.
3. MikTeX 2.0 has a command called "pdflatex", which you can use to create a PDF file directly from your LaTeX source. The only downside to this command is that it does not handle .eps or .ps images. So you will need to convert all of your images to PDF files before using this command. Then, in your LaTeX source, you will need to have "\usepackage[pdftex]{graphics}" or "\usepackage{graphicx}" for inclusion of these PDF images.