lout and ghostscript

[Mike Dowling]

Hello all,

I'm sure many of you have noticed this, and I'm just a little curious as to an
explanation.

When I view the output from lout using ghostview, a well known front end to
ghostscript, the spacing is all screwed up.  Words appear run together as
though they were a single word, yet printing on a laser, postscript printer
always produces beautiful results.

Recently, I printed on a deskjet 500.  Since this is not a postscript printer,
the postscript output from lout is recognised automatically by lpr, which then
pushes it through ghostscript as a filter, and the result of that is then
printed on the deskjet.  The result looks like that on my monitor when using
ghostview; horrible.

At this juncture, it's beginning to look like a problem with ghostscript;  I
can only get good results when ghostscript is not used.  Yet, with TeX, dvips
converts to postscript, which is then sent to lpr which pushes it through the
ghostscript filter to the printer, but with immaculate results!

What is going on?

Cheers,

        Mike