[pdftex] Sorry... Font problems under pdflatex

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Thu Mar 14 11:03:26 CET 2002


Leonardo Orazi <leonardo.orazi at tiscalinet.it> writes on Thu, 14 Mar 2002 17:25:38 +0000
about poor display quality of the file

	http://diem101.ing.unibo.it/personale/orazi/testo-20-12-2001.pdf

generated from the MikTeX distribution under Win NT.

If you view it with Adobe Acrobat Reader, and then follow the menu path
File -> Document Info -> Fonts, you'll find that most of the fonts 
are listed as being of Type 3, which is a bitmap font that Acrobat Reader,
quite unnecessarily, does a poor job of displaying.

Leonardo did not specify how the .pdf file was generated, but I'm
assuming that it was via pdftex, rather than TeX + a DVI driver.
pdftex uses the fonts that it finds in its search path; if there
is no Type 1 outline font equivalent for these fonts, then nothing
can be done.  If there is, then something as simple as adjusting
the TEXFONTS path to ensure that the outline fonts (typically,
.pfa or .pfb format, instead of .*pk) are found first.

For more discussion of these issues, visit

	http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/outline-vs-bitmap-fonts.html

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