Minus signs don't print - problem solved

[William R. Smith]

> William R. Smith wrote:
> 
> > In our experience, for any other output, the only problem is "falling
> > off the (bottom of the?) page", as you note.  However, the problem we
> > encountered here was that any minus signs IN THE MIDDLE OF THE
> > DOCUMENT simply disappeared when the document was printed from Adobe
> > Acrobat Reader.  They appeared fine on the computer screen tho.
> 
> Disable all caching, when using distiller, always embed subsets and
> prefix filenames if possible. Especially older distillers/readers do
> a lot of strange optimizations.  Spaces and minus are famous ones. 

Thanks for the info, but we have been using the latest copy of 
Acrobat Reader (3.01)  to read the .pdf files produced _directly_ by 
pdftex - we print them from the Reader.  We're pretty sure that the 
source of the particular problem we encountered when printing 
mathematical text has been identified - if the page size is A4, we 
can read it on the reader, but the minus signs disappear when 
printing  - but this result does not occur on all printers :-(

If I remember correctly, we also tried using distiller, and got the 
same result.

BTW, we've been using a Win95/NT machine - we've encountered 
printing problems for mathematical text using Acrobat Reader on a Mac 
too - but that's a completely different story - we've basically given 
up on that one.  Anyone have any ideas here?  The files are on 
http://www.chemical-stoichiometry.net.  The .pdf files cannot be 
printed at all from (some, but not all) Mac's.  We think the problem 
there is related to fonts that are available on most PC's but not on 
Mac's.  Since we are not keen on the use of Mac's ourselves, 
we have not pursued the matter.


Best Regards,


W. R. Smith                        Professor
                                   Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
                                   and School of Engineering
                                   University of Guelph
FAX: 519-837-0221                  Guelph, Ontario
Tel: 519-824-4120, ext. 3038       CANADA N1G 2W1