[pdftex] AR 5 not working with pdftex?

Thierry Bouche Thierry.Bouche at ujf-grenoble.fr
Mon May 21 12:54:08 CEST 2001


» I just experienced the same problem with Acrobat 5 (the "real" thing, not the reader).

yes, same for me. Technically, I check (kind of preflight) that my PDF
will be flashed smoothly by printing them to distiller. It worked
perfectly with 4 (i.e. when distiller had problems, the PS printer
driver on the mac and most RIP would have troubles too). 

Now, the same PDF won't print.

So far, I managed to reduce the pb to a minimum:
distiller seems to ignore the embedded fonts. If you include them,
then you get a message that AIUXD+XXX can't be used, if you don't
include them, it will search for the real XXX font in its font table
(nothing related to system-wide installed fonts): you have to declare
all the paths with the PFB that may be used in all your PDF in the
settings of acrobat. This done, it actually works for all regular
fonts. But synthesised fonts such as extended or slanted won't print,
because distiller seems to believe that they should be actual fonts
(CMR10_167, e.g.) that should have a related PFB. My hypothesis is
that acrobat either downloads  the subset chunks, which distiller is
unable to interpret, or only the font names (without the PS snipet
that would implement the modifs to the font dict such as FontMatrix in
the case of synthesised fonts). This is a very bad thing, and I'm
quite anxious about what will do the next generation of RIPs with our
PDF files...

On the other hand, it is a very good thing that now, the distiller
printer control pannel  allows to access the distiller job options--it
acted as a somewhat unpredictible black box before...




Thierry Bouche



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