[texhax] PDF produced by pdflatex rejected by Lulu.com

Pierre MacKay pierre.mackay at comcast.net
Fri Feb 10 06:46:54 CET 2012


On 02/09/2012 11:34 AM, Tom Bishop, Wenlin Institute wrote:
>> Has anybody either:
>> a. successfully printed LaTeX documents with Lulu?  or ...
>> b. had similar problems?  Solutions?
>
> We've had Lulu.com ship the "same" book to two addresses, one book printed correctly, and the other incorrectly. This happened to us with pdf files made using pdftex (plain TeX not LaTeX) with lots of embedded fonts. The characters in problematic fonts were simply blank in the badly printed books; the file was not rejected. Evidently Lulu.com does not always use equivalent printers or drivers. Solutions might be to avoid unusual fonts, normalize your pdfs somehow, and have all books shipped to your address for quality control inspection before shipping them elsewhere.
>
The lost character syndrome is very interesting, because it is something 
I have frequently experienced.  Is there any chance that all the lost 
characters belong to the Adobe Expert Encoding set? Dharacter 
disappearance will always happen (so far as I know) in a file produced 
with a non-Adobe distiller.  There is no place in Unicode for most of 
what appears in Adobe Expert Character encoding, and so Adobe has 
basically abandoned it, but not told you about the decision.  If I 
remember correctly, fonts using Adobe Expert Encoding are rendered 
properly in Reader 6, but produce spaces in Reader 7.  What Adobe has  
done is provide a truly Byzantine workaround, but you can only benefit 
from that if you use either Adobe on-line distiller (what I use) or buy 
the grossly overpriced package that gives you the same capabilities in 
the Adobe Acrobat Professional software combination.  (Warning: If you 
do decide to use the Acrobat Professional package, and have occasion to 
change your OS, you are out of luck.  You have to pay the full cost of 
the replacement package all over again.)  Ghostscript provides no 
solutions, and I am afraid I doubt that pdflatex has even thought about 
the problem.

Pierre MacKay

Pierre MacKay


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