[XeTeX] Font problem with publisher --- help!!!

Jonathan Kew jfkthame at googlemail.com
Fri Sep 11 19:25:55 CEST 2009


On 11 Sep 2009, at 17:17, Nicolas Vaughan wrote:

> Hi,
> I went to my publisher's and the problem was in some of the  
> technical drawings (created in Illustrator, and included as PDFs in  
> the LaTeX doc), some of whose fonts were not embedded.
> I had two possible solutions: to re-embed all fonts in the drawings,  
> or to convert everything to curves. I took the latter.
>
> The curious thing is that these problems could only be spotted (by  
> me, at my home-office) with a plugin as Enfocus. When I try to print  
> or view the PDFs, I have no problems.
>

You can view or print them because you have the relevant fonts on your  
system, presumably. (Or else Acrobat Reader silently performs a  
substitution, and the result looked OK so you didn't notice it.)

If you view the PDF with Acrobat [Reader], you should be able to look  
at the list of fonts used (somewhere in a properties dialog, I forget  
the exact details) and see whether it says they're embedded or not.

Similarly, the TeXworks PDF viewer has a Fonts panel (available from  
the Window / Show submenu) that should give the same information.

I don't know whether one of these would actually have worked in your  
case, to alert you to the problem earlier, but in theory at least....!

JK

> Thanks for all your useful comments.
> Cheers,
>
> Nicolas
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Nicolas Vaughan <nivaca at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
> Thanks, Jonathan.
> I agree that they're messing things up. I'm gonna see what they have  
> in mind.
> Best wishes,
> Nicolas
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Jonathan Kew  
> <jfkthame at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 11 Sep 2009, at 14:28, Nicolas Vaughan wrote:
>
> What do you think about converting all text to outlines? That'll  
> solve the problem, but I don't know if it has "collateral damages...
>
> I think you shouldn't be doing any of this.
>
> If something about the actual text needs to be changed, the  
> publisher should tell you what, so you can change it and regenerate  
> the PDF. (If you convert it to outlines, they can't edit it anyway.)
>
> And if they want to add something to the pages without actually  
> touching your text (e.g., their logo, ISBN, etc), then they should  
> be "placing" the PDF page (or an EPS copy) intact, complete with its  
> embedded fonts, not trying to open it in Illustrator for editing.
>
> In either case, it sounds like they're currently going about things  
> in completely the wrong way.
>
> JK
>
>
>
> Thanks,
> Nicolas
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Nicolas Vaughan <nivaca at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Thanks for your advices. I will be meeting today with my publisher  
> again, and I'm carrying with me a host of PDFs with your suggestions.
> In the end, I did as William suggested: export all the pages into  
> EPS and placed them in a INDD file.... let's wait to see what they  
> say now.
>
> Best wishes!
> Nicolas
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 7:59 AM, William Adams  
> <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:
> On Sep 11, 2009, at 2:17 AM, Nicolas Vaughan wrote:
>
> The problem persists, though. I think my publisher is trying to open  
> the PDF in Adobe Illustrator, in order to do something with the text  
> block (don't know why!). But when he tries to do that, AI reports  
> that KP-etc. fonts are not available. And they aren't available to  
> the OS (and to AI) since they are LaTeX fonts only.
>
> Any ideas?
>
>
> If they want to do something other than edit text, they can open  
> your .pdf in Adobe Acrobat Professional, save out the pages which  
> they wish to change as .eps files, then place (not open) those .eps  
> files in Adobe Illustrator (or better still Adobe InDesign) and add  
> whatever additional elements need to be added (they'll need to set  
> up the page properly to match trim, bleed &c.) --- of course if the  
> text needs to be edited, then they'll need for you to do that as  
> previous respondents have noted.
>
> Or they could purchase Enfocus PitStop and use it for any such .pdf  
> editing.
>
> Adobe Illustrator is _not_ a general purpose .pdf editor and has to  
> translate all elements of a .pdf into its own internal format which  
> can result in marked changes in appearance or text formatting and  
> then creates the need to proof the edited file character for  
> character, line for line, graphic for graphic.
>
> William
>
> -- 
> William Adams
> senior graphic designer
> Fry Communications
> Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
>
>
>
>
>
>



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