[XeTeX] Display quality of fonts

[Christoph Bier]

AFAICS XeTeX always embeds OpenType fonts as type 1 CID in PDF
files. Unfortunately xpdf---my favourite PDF viewer---renders those
fonts badly (t1lib and FreeType are enabled). Here's [1] how it
looks with xpdf and here [2] how I'm used to produced by pdfTeX and
with type 1 fonts (and without the long s). Fonts used: MinionPro
and Bitstream Frutiger aka Humanist 777. Furthermore xpdf doesn't
show every character used in e.g. fontspec.pdf [3]. But also AR
7.0.8 has some problems with certain pages in fontspec.pdf. Here's
[4] one of the badly displayed pages and here [5] the next page
that's displayed well.

Is there a different way to embed fonts with XeTeX on Linux that I
overlook? I understand the displaying problem is a matter of the PDF
viewer and not of the typesetting engine. But even if the next
release of xpdf or AR---when will it be?---will fix this, I can not
assume that the people I share my PDF files with will upgrade soon
to the new versions.

I really appreciate the development of XeTeX and especially the
Linux port! But I develop my PDF files with xpdf as viewer and share
them with people using xpdf. Thus I need good looking fonts on screen.

Best,
  Christoph

[1] http://zvisionwelt.de/tmpdownloads/XeTeX-type1-CID-xpdf.png (193KB)
[2] http://zvisionwelt.de/tmpdownloads/pdfTeX-type1-xpdf.png (117KB)
[3] http://zvisionwelt.de/tmpdownloads/fontspec-xpdf301.png (117KB)
[4] http://zvisionwelt.de/tmpdownloads/fontspec-AR708-bad.png (175KB)
[5] http://zvisionwelt.de/tmpdownloads/fontspec-AR708-good.png (196KB)
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