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

[George N. White III]

On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> >>>>> "George" == George N White <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca> writes:
>
>     > 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.
>
> Hi George,
> if something which worked with an old teTeX doesn't work with a new
> one, it should be mentioned on this mailing list.  It is quite
> unlikely, anyway.
>
> There should be absolutely no reason to keep an old version of teTeX.
> If I'm wrong, let me know.

It is a sort of safety blanket. Where I work, we have a fairly high
turnover of experienced TeX users (visitors, grad students, contractors,
and post-docs) and we exchange TeX documents with other sites.  Many TeX
users have been burned in the past, and very nervous about any changes.

The problems I see when we update TeX are mostly configuration and font
installation.  The main reason for keeping the old version is to have the
old packages, config files, and fonts so you have a hope of figuring out
what needs to be done to get old documents to format properly on the new
system.  We try to keep such things in texmf-local and $HOME/texmf on
shared systems, but on personal workstations people will add stuff to the
main tree because they are following some instructions they got with the
fonts or from c.t.t.  There have been problems where a user needed to
install a newer version of a package to get a bug fix, put it in
$HOME/texmf, but then ends up using that version long after other bugs
have been fixed in the main texmf tree with a teTeX upgrade.

About a year ago we had a book-length eplain document with lots of EPS
figures from various sources using epsf.tex. Different users (many at
other sites) had problems with a different subset of the EPS figures.
The number of different versions of epsf.tex lurking in the wild is truly
astounding.  There are different strategies to handle binary garbage at
the start of the file and different ideas about helping the user by adding
spaces and centering figures.  I ended up providing a version that used
used miniltx to load graphicx.sty.

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