[tex-k] xdvi with gs 7.0.4, and a test for making good pdf

[M. Shell]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> 
> It's because you can get a file from anyone else that might overwrite
> your files or installs its own ~/rhosts.
> 

Are you saying that the security measure consists of requiring
the calling program to know the full path to the user's home directory?
Is this not easy to obtain by a malicious program?
Won't having xdvi expand the full path bypass this anyway?

IMHO, security should focus on *writes* not *reads*. If a file
is set to world readable than its contents are fair reading by
any user or application on the system.


>     > Some of the more interesting tid bits is the discovery that
>     > Acrobat reader will display Times Roman as Times New
>     > Roman. (This is the result of another "Microsoft thing".) When
>     > printing, the PostScript engine of the printer will restore
>     > things to Times Roman (I _think_ that's where the final Times
>     > Roman fonts come from), but Acrobat will have sent the printer
>     > the Times New Roman metrics! So, you can end up having little
> 
> Sure?  Where should they come from?  The metrics come from your .tfm
> file and that's for Adobe Times.  If you use Adobe Times for printing,
> everything is ok.  And it's not the PostScript engine of your printer
> that restores the correct fonts, but Acrobat itself.
> 
> The problem is that wrong fonts are used on screen.
> 


You don't get the horror of what I am saying. I am saying that unless
the Times fonts are embedded into the pdf file, Acrobat reader will
trash the careful typesetting of LaTeX and this WILL SHOW UP IN
THE 
OUTPUT WHEN PRINTED ON A POSTSCRIPT PRINTER! Because Times Roman and
Times New Roman have such similar metrics, the errors are subtle.

Try it for yourself. Get my testflow.tex from 
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mshell/ 
and make a pdf from it without subsetting and embedding the Times fonts. 
Then print the pdf file from Acrobat reader 5.0.x to a 
PostScript printer. Observe what happens to the first quote in the
Micro Metric test. Now repeat the test, this time embedding and
subsetting the Times fonts. Note that earlier versions of Ghostscript
(6.01) may not show the problem, but I think this is because the
older version may be doing something else incorrect (two wrongs
making a right). The only way to ensure perfect printing every
time is embed and subset every font including the base 14 ones.

This is why those people in that thread I mentioned were so upset!

BTW, Sebastian did give me a URL that has the complete archives:

ftp://ftp.tug.org/mail-archives/pdftex/



 Mike