[pdftex] How to get pdflatex to embed and subset ALL fonts?

George N. White III aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca
Sun Feb 15 13:46:22 CET 2004


On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Elzbieta Roszkowska wrote:

> I am going to upgrade teTeX to 2.0, but not right now and this paper is
> urgent. So I am really grateful.

It is unfortunate that the teTeX and TL docs don't give more advice to
people caught between the need to preserve a mostly working (older) distro
and the need for improvements in a newer distro.  This is the sort of
thing that is simple for someone who knows the OS and TeX well, but hard
to explain for someone new to both.

It is possible to have more than one TeX system installed.
Unfortunately, package manager tools generally don't support having
multiple versions of a package installed, so it takes some manual work and
some care in switching back and forth.  TeX Live 2003 on unix is very
self-contained, and can be installed in a location of your choosing.  We
have had as many a 4 TeX distros installed on Win32 for comparative
testing, but it is more work than it should be.

> Btw, out of dispair I downloaded Acrobat try-out (30 days, MS Window
> version), yet ... it didn't let me do the conversion. I guess it's a
> demo that does not support all features. Conversion pdf -> pdf by
> printing to a pdf file produces something that cannot be opened and
> looks like a corrupted file.  Conversion ps -> pdf gives a better
> result, yet the destiller does not recognize all fonts.

You need to install the fonts where distiller can find then (assuming you
use only Type 1 fonts). At one time, distiller was needed to get robust
PDF (but you had to use Y&Y's dvipsone, as dvips is resolution-dependent).
The current pdftex is very robust (but you may need to update the version
installed by TL 2003).  Recent versions of Ghostscript generally do a
reasonable job of converting ps to pdf.  The GSview front end (Win32 and
*n*x) makes it easy to try different settings.

--
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada


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