[pdftex] AR 5 not working with pdftex?

[Y&Y Support]

Interesting observation!

At 23:36 2001-06-02 +1000, Robert Howlett wrote:

>It seems that Acrobat Reader 5 objects only to some of the
>characters in cmr10.pfb; specifically, characters
>13, 14, 15, 25, 26, 30, 36, 37, 51, 52, 53, 54, 62, 63,
>66, 71, 82, 83, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112,
>113, 114, and 115.

Looking at the glyphnames rather than the numeric codes:
fl, ffi, ffl, germandbls, ae, OE, dollar, percent,
three, four, five, six, questiondown, question,
B, G, R, S, a, b, d, g, i, j, m, p, q, r, s ...(*)

Anyone see the pattern?

Those are characters that require hint replacement.
For example, in the digit three, the upper bow is shifted
left slightly relative to the lower box and so has to be hinted
separately. Ditto for the upper and lower bowls in "B".
And so on.

Looking at the BSR/Y&Y/AMS et al fonts
http://www.ams.org/index/tex/type1-fonts.html
one sees that the above glyphs in CMR10.PFB
all use hint replacements
(the newer Y&Y versions
http://www.yandy.com/river/setdetail-CM.htm
have additional hint replacement code).

The hint replacement is done via subroutine call.
In "modern" Type 1 fonts (less than ten years old)
this tends to be done via a standardized call to
subroutine 4.

Some software (such as ATM)
--- which does not understand PostScript --- does not
interpret the subroutines.  So if you change this
linkage for hint replacement it will break things.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is some cleverness in
the output from pdfTeX that trips up Acrobat.
When it comes to font handling it pays to
"program to the lowest common denominator".

Regards, Louis.

(*) Actually the CMR10.PFB pulled off the AMS server
also has hint replacement in fi, eight, nine, n and u.
It's odd that those don't trigger the same problem,
but maybe the test list given above wasn't quite complete...

P.S. These "problems" with Acrobat 5 Reader do not
occur with PDF files made using Y&Y TeX/DVIPSONE
and Distiller 4 or Distiller 5.

>  For all of these I got the "an error
>occurred while downloading a font, the file may not
>print correctly" message (on a document with just the
>one character). Other characters were OK.
>Putting << in the map file didn't actually solve the problem,
>because the characters listed above were still substituted
>by characters from Courier at printing. In particular,
>ligatures that Courier doesn't have were missing.
>
>I tried using cmr10.ttf instead of cmr10.pfb. Sometimes
>I still get the same error, sometimes I don't.
>
>Bob Howlett
>
>"Christopher S. Swingley" wrote:
> >
> > Than,
> >
> > > The map files that are listed in your pdftex.cfg (usually under
> > > $TEXMF/pdftex/config)
> >
> > Thanks, I found it in /etc/texmf/dvips/pdftex.map and changed the '<'
> > to '<<'.  This solves the problem with it being unable to download
> > one of the fonts (so the font isn't substituted in the printout),
> > but it causes another -- the ligatures are missing!  Acrobat and
> > Acrobat Reader 5.0 show them correctly on the screen, but there is
> > a blank space on the printed copy.
> >
> > Chris
> > --
> > Christopher S. Swingley         930 Koyukuk Drive
> > System / Network Manager        University of Alaska Fairbanks
> > IARC -- Frontier Program        Fairbanks, AK 99775
> >
> > phone: 907-474-2689             fax: 907-474-2643
> > email: cswingle at iarc.uaf.edu    GNUPG and PGP2 keys at my web site
> >   web: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle
> > _______________________________________________
> > pdftex mailing list
> > pdftex at tug.org
> > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/pdftex
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