[pdftex] Embedding Base14 fonts

[George N. White III]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Hans Hagen wrote:

> At 14:14 29/03/2004, George N. White III wrote:
>
> >The "easy" fix is to use the URW fonts and always embed.  With figures
> >I often convert fonts to paths so I can be sure they will display properly
> >now and in the future.
>
> indeed, since few years i always embed everything (otherwise one gets the
> arial instead and worse);
>
> btw, some time ago we had a project with graphic coming from different
> suppliers, and when i looked in the resulting doc i found out that there
> were some 8 different lucida clones/instances in there. (something similar
> for helvetica). I tried to explain that to the people responsible for it
> ... and gave up; their validation tools (sic) saw no danger luring.
>
> (i must look into that convert to paths; does that influence the quality?)

For figures, especially those that may be reused, getting rid of fonts
makes life much easier.  These days with PDF it isn't so much of a
problem, but until very recently academic publishers look for EPS
figures.

Screen display suffers due to lack of hinting, but typeset quality is
preserved.  We do lots of dye-sub images for which anti-aliasing is
key to getting decent looking text -- I suspect that font hinting in
some rasterizers may actually hurt anti-aliased rendering in some
situations.

Conversion to paths is available in drawing packages (Illustrator),
pstoedit '-dt' option, ghostscript epswrite with "-dNOCACHE", or using
ghostscript with ps2ai.ps with suitable settings. I started doing this
years ago because some rasterizers had problems with the computer modern
fonts.  Then I discovered how often press people massage "EPS" figures
(and will often print and scan a figure that fails to load in Illustrator
either because the fonts aren't installed or because the file was created
with another app).

--
George N. White III  <WhiteG at dfo-mpo.gc.ca> <gnw3 at acm.org>
902-426-8509 | facsimile / télécopieur 902-426-9388
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