The problem is fonts. When you use dvips to create a PostScript file from a DVI file, dvips has to include font information in the PostScript file. Dvips usually uses Type 3 bitmap font definitions that are relatively efficient and are rendered just fine by printers and scaled and rendered very well with GhostScript's anti-aliasing algorithms.
Unfortunately, when you use GhostScript to make a PDF file from this PostScript file, the result is almost illegible. I don't know if this is the fault of the PDF writer in GhostScript, the PDF format itself, or how GhostScript and Acroread render the fonts when displaying the PDF file. However, if you include the full PostScript Type 1 font definitions in the PostScript file, they will be used by the PDF file as well and the result is very nice. Ghostscript's rendering of Type 1 fonts is fair, but doesn't seem as good as the anti-aliased bitmap fonts.
The details of using Type 1 fonts have been documented by Adobe. Fortunately, most people shouldn't need to know those details. The following alternatives are commonly found in today's software distributions:
| Command | Fonts under GhostScript (gv, ghostview) | Fonts under Acrobat | PostScript Figures & Specials | Hyperlinks (LaTeX hyperref package) | Notes |
| dvips; ps2pdf (GhostScript's dvipdf script) | Good | Illegible | Yes | No | |
| dvips -Ppdf; ps2pdf | Fair | Good | Yes | No | Doesn't work well on all systems. Try my config.pdf which depends on pdftex's pdf.map |
| dvipdfm | Fair | Good | Yes | Yes | Page is shifted down about 0.5in |
| pdf(la)tex | Fair | Good | No | Yes | Page is shifted down about 0.5in
Can include PDF files. Use epstopdf to convert .eps files to .pdf |