# Exporting a histogram to PDF in without rasterising it

How can I export a histogram without rasterising it? The labels and axes seem unaffected, but the bars themselves are pixelated when I zoom into them in a PDF viewer.

For example, if I run

Export["~/test.pdf", Histogram@RandomVariate[NormalDistribution[], 1000]];

I get a PDF that looks like this when zoomed in:

This is a problem when I try to run it through pdf2ps and ps2pdf (to work around some font problems when including the PDFs in a LaTeX document), since the whole image gets rasterised, including the text.

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Did you see mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/1546/1356? –  Öskå Jul 24 '13 at 14:45
I think that might be opacity rather than rasterisation. At least, when you import the PDF, it comes in as lines (Opacity[0.595`]) not as an image... –  cormullion Jul 24 '13 at 15:41
@cormullion You're quite right. I now think converting to PostScript is entirely the wrong thing to do. All I really want is to convert the text into vector shapes, so that the fonts don't cause problems. –  Will Vousden Jul 24 '13 at 15:52
Perhaps this is of interest: How to preserve clipping when exporting a framed histogram with font embedding?. But the problem shown in your screenshot is due to Opacity, as @cormullion notes. –  Jens Jul 24 '13 at 16:14