I have two questions, which I have put up several times in different forums in the past years, but I never got an answer.

I just thought I might try it again:

A) X11 video modes

When I use a video mode of 1024x768, I get a correct picture on my monitor.
When I change to any other video modes, e.g. 800x600 or 640x480, the screen image is dispositioned and distorted.
Especially at 640x480, where the screen image becomes a square (screen aspect ratio 1:1, instead of 4:3), the screen image stretches over the visible area of the screen vertically, while I have large black bands at the left and right side of the display.
Does this mean that I have to resize the display with the OSD controls each time I change video mode, or is there a way to pre-configure X11 to get a correct screen at each video mode?

B) Ghostscript and pdf creation

I find that the pdf files created by ghostscript (ps2pdf, used as a "virtual pdf printer" from network) only look well if I send true type fonts to the pdfprinter as outlines.
However, when I extract text from such pdf files created by Ghostscript, I get only garbage (all characters are there, but replaced by an other character); not the original text. Also: acroread's text search function never finds anything in these files.
This limits the use of ghostscript much: I can only use it for one or two page documents, because longer documents are likely to be searched inside.
Is it possible to setup Ghostscript so that it creates absolutely correct pdf files?
Could you give me some hints?

You should be able to define proper modelines that avoid distortion
if your monitor is unable to keep track of settings you made in the OSD.



Cheers,
Tink

> You should be able to define proper modelines that avoid distortion

Do you mean that I should e.g. manually edit /etc/X11/XF86Config?
I tried it, but I do not understand the underlying concept, so its hard to do it correctly for me.
E.g.:
When I press CTRL ALT +, I cycle through 3 modes: 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480.
But there are several modelines for each resolution in the XF86Config file! Which one is actually used when I change modes?
I gave it a try: I left only one modline for each screen resolution, by commenting out the others. For 800x600 and 640x480 resolutions, I intentionally left those modelines in place, which use lower refresh rates.
Logged out and logged in again, and when changing video modes to 800x600 or 640x480, I found as if the display was not using those low refresh rates I had specified in /etc/XF86Config for these resolutions, but it invariably used the 90Hz that I had specified for 1024x768 there.

So, what is the file that actually determines the X11 modes used by the system?
What is the relation between /etc/X11/XF86Config and /etc/fb.modes?
What is the easiest way to quickly test changes made to /etc/XF86Config? Do I have to struggle though the long KDE startup anytime I want to test a slight change, or even worse: should I restart the machine each time I make a change?

I am not an expert with ps or pdf but a quick read of the ps2pdf page here:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/6.50/Ps2pdf.htm

has this in the limitations section:

"ps2pdf will sometimes convert text to high-resolution bitmapped fonts rather than to embedded outline fonts. Currently, this will always occur when the PostScript file uses CID-keyed or double-byte fonts, when the input file uses kshow, or in some cases if it uses fonts with non-standard encodings; it may occur in other cases as well."

Looks like that is the explanation for why you cannot extract text properly from pdf files. That also might explain why adobe is having issues with searches.

Have you tried xvidtune to adjust the screen dimensions? I believe it will allow you to test various settings "on the fly".

To Flyfishin:
> ps2pdf will sometimes convert text to high-resolution bitmapped fonts

Maybe, but I still hope that there is a solution.

So far as I can judge, my problem is caused by the TrueType fonts:
If I send them to ps2pdf as outlines, the document looks good, but it is unsearchable.
If I do not send them, but use the device fonts, instead, then the result is incorrect and unreadable because of overlapping characters.
As almost everything on the Windows clients uses TrueType fonts, I have this problem with almost all documents.

I would need a solution to solve the problem, if possible, on the unix server.
Maybe install some fonts there, to replace the TrueType fonts that the windows clients use? But what fonts?

Here is the font information of one such badly encoded pdf file:

Original font/Type/Encoding/Used font/Type
TTE17D9438t00/TrueType/Built-in/Embedded Subset/TrueType
TTE17D8568t00/TrueType/Built-in/Embedded Subset/TrueType
Times-Roman/Type 1/Custom/TimesNewRomanPSMT/Type 1

In the above file, only the text using the Type 1 font are correct and searchable.