Technical advice for conversion from LaTeX to PDF

Google seems to have difficulty indexing PDF documents which use Type 3 (bitmapped) fonts (rather than Type 1 (scaleable) fonts).  The font type can be checked by loading the file into Acrobat Reader and selecting File->Document Properties and then the Fonts tab.

For documents produced from LaTeX, you can force Type 1 fonts either by using  dvipdfm  to produce the PDF file direct from the DVI file, or by including a \usepackage{times} command in the LaTeX file (to use PostScript, rather than LaTeX, fonts) and then using either dvipdfm or the usual dvips and  ps2pdf .

If you are including images in a document and they are of poor quality once converted to PDF, you need to change the way they are encoded in the PDF document by adding the lines:

systemdict /setdistillerparams known {

<< /AutoFilterColorImages false /ColorImageFilter /FlateEncode >>

setdistillerparams } if

to the .eps file containing the image, just below the lines that start %%.