How do I make quality PDFs from LaTeX?

[Jonathan Matthews <jaycee@jaycee.uklinux.net>]

Hi all.

I've tried googling lists.debian.org, but I don't get anything coming up 
that seems to address my problem.

I'm trying to get a "nice" looking PDF from a latex document.  I'm using 
the normal article class, with no other packages loaded.  I'm using a 
couple of symbols that I wouldn't expect to find on a keyboard (namely 
\times and \equiv) but apart from that I don't think I'm using anything 
unusual.

I'm using pdflatex to output the PDF, and I'm aiming for print quality, 
not screen quality, if they're not related.

I'm seeing a variety of problems in the .pdf output, but latex by itself 
doesn't exhibit any of them when I create DVI output.

The problems I'm seeing include:

o Missing characters
	- lowercase "a", fagawdsake!

o Wierd quoting
	- the source document has
		''a quote''
	- the .dvi has
		"a quote" - but with 66s and 99s (as I'd expect)
	- however, the .pdf has
		\a quote''

o Missing symbols
	- \times
	- \equiv

Generally, not a great looking document.

I'm hoping that someone can say "just install the 'foo' package, and 
you're set", but I'd be willing to do a fair bit of digging around if 
anyone thinks it'll help.  On the other hand, I hope that maybe there's 
another font package that needs installing?  Puuuurrrlease?

I'm running up-to-date sid with tetex-{base,bin,extra} installed.  No 
manual configuration's been done beyond apt-get's efforts.

Thanks for any help!
jc