[pdftex] strange hyphen quirk

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Jansche <jansche at ling.ohio-state.edu> writes:

    > Hi, I noticed the following problem with Ghostscript when
    > viewing certain PDF files produced by pdfTeX.  The problem is
    > that the hyphen is rendered as if it had zero width: it is
    > displayed on top of other glyphs, and subsequent text is moved
    > leftwards.  At the moment, I'm convinced that this problem isn't
    > solely due to Ghostscript.

    > My pdfTeX version is "pdfTeX (Web2C 7.3.9) 3.14159-1.10a-devel"
    > and I'm running GNU gs 7.05 (everything from Debian
    > unstable/testing).  The problem arises with the following input
    > file:

You can use a smaller file to reproduce the problem:

\usepackage{report}
\usepackage{charter}
\begin{document}
I-I \"a
\end{document}

That's what I can confirm:

This problem can be reproduced with gs 7.04 and newer.  Versions up
to 7.03 do not have this problem.

The problem is only present whith embedded fonts, no matter whether
they are partially or completely downloaded.

It appears if a composed character is present, either produced by
tex's \accent primitive or by the type1 seac subroutine.

There is no problem with cm-super, most likely because there are no
composed characters in cm-super at all.

    > However, the problem does NOT arise with embedded CM Type 1
    > fonts.

Do you use cm-super or the bsr fonts?

If fonts are not embedded (Times, Helvetica), there is no problem.

If I use gs to convert the pdf file to ps (pdf2ps) and load the
resulting file into gv I get the error message "interpreter failed in
main window".  pdftops (from xpdf) produced correct output (as I
expected).

This might indicate that pdfTeX is ok.  The output (with
\pdfcompresslevel=0) looks very good, but I cannot look into the font.
The pfb-fonts are modified by pdfTeX, i.e. the ^^M's have been removed
from the ASCII part of the file as well as the binary header, which
contains the byte offset to the eexec section.  Thus I cannot
disassemble the font (yet).

Even if there is a bug in pdfTeX it would be helpful to find out what
had been changed between gs7.03 and gs7.04.

Is there someone brave enough to burrow into thousands of files? 

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha			             Phone: +49-511-27060390
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	              mailto:reinhard at kammer.uni-hannover.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------