[pdftex] Re: Embedding fonts

Heiko Oberdiek oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de
Fri Aug 9 12:58:13 CEST 2002


On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 01:59:09AM +0200, Jens-Uwe Morawski wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Aug 2002 22:23:58 +0200
> Thomas Esser <te at informatik.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
> 
> > > one option can be to have a command line switch for specifying the config 
> > > file to use, say --config=myconfig.cfg, since that way one can set more 
> > > options, like compressions
> > 
> > That's exactly what would help. Similar to dvips's -P switch which can
> > be used to load additional config files. It would be nice, then, to be
> > able to read more than one config file. E.g. have a config file that
> > loads an additional map file *and* still read pdftex.cfg. Otherwise,
> > one would need to replicate settings and maintain them in several files
> > (compression, paper sizes etc.).
> 
> I don't believe that somebody remembers the command line options
> he has used a year ago to process a pdfTeX document.

Also you have to remember dvips's -P options. And with Makefile
or similar methods nobody needs remember some of the options.

> since pdfTeX
> is TeX and backend in one programm it should be possible to specify
> all options in the TeX file. 

Problematic and of limited use:
* Not portable. For example, the names and number of map files
  can differ on different systems.
* Wrong: The author specifies PostScript fonts, but the
  user wants to process the source with specialized pk fonts
  for his printer in order to get best print results.
* Problematic: For technical reasons most options can only
  be set _before_ use. So it can be too late, if a option
  is set by a LaTeX package for instance.

Therefore I agree full with Thomas.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>



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