[pdftex] Characters missing when printing from Acrobat

[George N. White III]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Carsten Friedrich wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I use pdftex and WinEdt on a windows 98 machine. Because my pdf files
> would not print from acrobat with partially embedded fonts I changed my
> font map to include many fonts completely (changing < to <<). I tried not
> to do this for standard fonts like courier and times. My document displays
> fine when displayed using acrobat, but when printing, some characters are
> missing.
> They include the minus sign in mathematical formulas and greek letters in
> mathematical formulas. Acrobat says my document uses the following fonts:
>
> original font, type, encoding, actual font, type
>
> Times-Bold, type1, custom, TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, Type1
> Times-Roman, type 1, custom, TimesNewRomanPSMT, type 1
> CM<something>, type 1, built-in, embedded, type1
> Times-Italic, type 1, custom, TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT, type 1
> Courier, type 1, custom, ,,
>
> CM<something> is short for a list of all kinds of CM fonts. Courier does not
> seem to have an actual font.
>
> Any idea what the problem might be and how to fix it?
>
> Thanks,
> Carsten

I have seen this sort of problem a few years ago with AR 3.x and
early versions of pdftex -- since TeX encode the math minus as
ASCII NUL it often breaks early versions of software that attempt
to use "standard" C null-terminated strings.  Glyphs encoded as
ASCII control characters have also caused problems, which is why
some systems reencode those glyphs, but I haven't seen the problem
recently.

What version of pdftex?  I have (on assorted unix systems and Win95):

Version 3.14159-1.00a-pretest-20010806-2.1 (Web2C 7.3.3.1)

What version of Acrobat Reader are you using?  4.05 works well, I'm
not sure of the status of the 5.x versions.  What happens when you
display the file using the current gsview (which will nag you to
purchase a license, but can be used without an up-front payment).

If all this doesn't help, please put a small example with the TeX
source and the pdf on a public server somewhere (preferably without
pdf compression) so we can analyze the problem.

-- 
George N. White III <gnw3 at acm.org> Bedford Institute of Oceanography