[OS X TeX] OT: help with font embeddings

[Jan Anderssen]

hello.

first, i wanted to say thanks again for all the replies, they were  
very helpful!

second, i just wanted to post some of my experiences. not sure i  
understand overall what was going on in every case, but maybe some of  
it is still interesting...

i ended up using a combination of both methods.

*** 1 *** pdf -> ps, and then redistilling with acrobat

* using pdftops from the xpdf suite:

--- for many papers this produced a font mess, for instance in tex-ed  
papers the fi ligature would come out as a T with a dot underneath  
(fun way to discover new glyphs)

--- for some reason or other the itc zapf dingbats i have could not  
be embedded at all. once i copied a .pfb version from a pc-version of  
acrobat reader over into my font library, it worked.

* using pdf2ps from gs:

--- fonts in the above papers came out right, but everything was  
bitmapped. redistilling the files was really slow (37 sec. for a 19  
page paper vs. 9 sec. for the pdftops produced one).


*** 2 *** save as pdf/x-3 (save as / print to pdf) from preview

this worked nicely. in comparison to acrobat distiller with detailed  
options, preview asks you surprisingly few questions (actually,  
none). later i found that some of the settings can be adjusted  
within /Applications/Utilities/ColorSync Utility under Filters.

this route seemed to work nicely for all documents that displayed  
right in preview, and was what i mainly used.

one paper didn't display quotation marks right in preview (despite  
having all fonts embedded), however that one was curable using the  
pdftops > redistill route.


sorry this is kinda delayed after the original posts, but progress  
was a little slow, and other things intervened. but now all worked  
out, and i learned about pdffonts, and have a tiny perl script that  
can run it on multiple files, and report potential troubles, which  
will be very helpful in the future. so, thanks for all!

jan

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