[pdftex] followup for font substitution problems in pdflatex 1.30

Tim Arnold Tim.Arnold at sas.com
Fri Sep 15 20:59:08 CEST 2006


This is possibly a rare problem, but since I finally solved it I thought I'd share it here:

Situation:
Book (using pdflatex) that includes many pdf images; need font-substitution ability (so fonts are not embedded with each included pdf image).
Typically, one embeds the fonts in each pdf image and uses \pdfmapline in the book preamble to do the font substitution.

Problem: 
Ghostscript embeds the fonts as Type1C instead of Type1;  there was (is?) a bug in pdftex 1.30 so that font substitution works only for Type1 fonts, not Type1C. The bug is fixed in pdftex 1.40.

Solution:
Either (a) upgrade to pdftex 1.40, or (b) find a way to embed Type1 fonts.
I could not upgrade my installation at this time, so I needed the ghostscript solution.
Note that using this method will provide Type1 font embedding, but the final compatibility level is 1.2.
Many thanks to the writers/readers of comp.lang.postscript. 

%% gs -v
AFPL Ghostscript 8.54 (2006-05-17)
Copyright (C) 2005 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA.  All rights reserved.

%% ps2pdfwr -dForOPDFRead arigs02.pdf temp.pdf

%% pdffonts arigs02.pdf
name                                 type         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
NimbusSanL-BoldItal                  Type 1       no  no  no       7  0
NimbusSanL-ReguItal                  Type 1       no  no  no       9  0
NimbusSanL-Regu                      Type 1       no  no  no      11  0

%% pdffonts temp.pdf
name                                 type         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
MNNDXR+NimbusSanL-Regu               Type 1       yes yes no      10  0
HDVVBD+NimbusSanL-BoldItal           Type 1       yes yes no       6  0
SYEPSF+NimbusSanL-ReguItal           Type 1       yes yes no       8  0



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