FW: [pdftex] pdf file not displaying properly in browser

Beuthe, Thomas beuthet at aecl.ca
Mon Mar 19 22:23:30 CET 2001


Hey!  There are even more interesting problems that can occur
if you're not even using the "directly create a pdf via pdftex" route.
Consider the poor sap who uses distiller (a commercial product), and
doesn't realise that there's something called Settings > job options > fonts
and in here, there's something called "never embed" which, by default
contains all of the usual fonts contained on a PC.  Things like times
and so on.  But, what if you happen to have a mac?  Oops.  Or, like me
you are distilling postscripts put out by Corel which have neat Greek
characters in them that get ignored, but my system doesn't have these fonts
resident?  What happens?  When you try to display the file, the Greek
symbols
just aren't there.  Error messages? Nope!  There never were any!
What a feature that is!  It took me three solid days to find that one.
So much for "portable".

Lesson to everyone: make sure you ALWAYS embed ALL of your fonts!
Otherwise your pdf file may only by "df" and not "p".

Just thought you might be interested...


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark A. Wicks [mailto:mwicks at kettering.edu]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 5:28 PM
To: rhowlett at mail.usyd.edu.au
Cc: pdftex at tug.org
Subject: Re: [pdftex] pdf file not displaying properly in browser




On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 rhowlett at mail.usyd.edu.au wrote:

> > Robert Howlett <rhowlett at mail.usyd.edu.au> writes:
> > 
> > ...
> > > I am puzzled by a minor problem that I am having now that I have not
> > > had before, at least for several years. The pdf files I create using

> I now believe that the phenomenon is this: when I first click
> on the link to the pdf file, the data is transmitted OK and the
> acrobat reader plug-in starts but the page remains blank. If
> I now click the browser's "back" button and then the "forward"
> button then the pdf file comes up OK on the screen. I usually
> use Netscape but on one occasion IE did something similar.
> 
> The strange thing is that I've been making and posting these
> pdf files for years and never had this particular behaviour
> before (as far as I can remember). All that has changed is the
> version of pdftex and the version of the browser.

   That behavior sounds like well-known bug that occured with certain
combinations of Netscape and the Acrobat reader plug-in.  I don't recall
IE being affected.  I thought it had been fixed and I haven't seen it in a
while.  If it's the same problem, the workaround is to load the document
into Acrobat (the full-product, not the reader) and select the "optimize"
option.  New versions of GS have a stand-alone optimizer.

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