[XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated pdf?

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hello,

Always be careful with pdf2ps. If one converts PS to PDF, information is lost - this is one of the reasons that the PDF file is usually smaller in size than the PS file. So it is technically not always possible to perfectly reconstruct a PS from a PDF. So be careful, especially if the material is to be printed professionally.

Some tips and tricks that I find useful:

- EPS has a built-in JPEG support. If you use the program "jepg2ps", the resulting EPS will be only marginally larger than the original JPEG file.
- Convert EPS to PDF with ps2pdf
- Use pdfcrop to cut off irrelevant whitespace from a PDF
- If you want to use matlab figures (or from a similar software), then saving the output as PS gives you some more control if you want to make a PDF - but at the expense of more work for you. Note that scilab (an open-source and free matlab-like software) has very poor support for EPS and PDF, but it is still workable.
- Use pdfpages.sty to manipulate external PDFs directly into your latex document
- Use pdftk if you want to do fancy things with a PDF file (merging, splitting, nup printing, etc)

Cheers,
Wilfred



________________________________
 From: Adam Russell <arussell at cs.uml.edu>
To: xetex at tug.org 
Sent: Friday, 4 May 2012, 3:02
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated pdf?
 
On 5/3/12 1:10 PM, xetex-request at tug.org wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 3 May 2012 11:08:00 +0200
>> From: Zdenek Wagner<zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
>> To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms<xetex at tug.org>
>> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated
>>     pdf?
>> Message-ID:
>>     <CAC1phybAu4bH1TL+yP+ExpOhJumnQ1Ms56Gh9mAP-LzdYGZxDQ at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-2"
>>
>> Short answer: you have to buy Helvetica.
>>
>> Long answer: There are basic 15 PS fonts and basic 35 PDF fonts that
>> must be according to the specification available everywhere. However,
>> this requirement is broken even in Adobe products (the author of the
>> specification) and it is quite common to see different versions of
>> Times and Helvetica with different metrics (it cost me some money and
>> damaged output to discover this crucial problem). It is therefore
>> good (and required by DTP studios and printer houses) to embed all
>> fonts. These 35 basic fonts are commercial and thus cannot be
>> distributed with TeX. There are free replacements (from URW and other
>> vendors). Now you have two options:
>>
>> 1. Embed the replacement fonts possibly losing quality
>> 2. Do not embed the font and hope that the user has either the
>> commercial font or a replacement font that will not be worse.
>>
>> Of course option 1 is better unless you know that the user has the
>> commercial font with exactly the same metrics as you. You have to look
>> into the manual of your TeX distribution how to instruct it to embed
>> all fonts (it is done by updmap-sys in TeX Live). If you want to have
>> fonts with better quality, you can consider using TeX Gyre Heros
>> instead of Helvetica.
>>
>> Still one problem remains. You may include images created by tools as
>> gnuplot or inkscape that insert texts in Helvetica but do not embed
>> the font. It will need some tweaking depending on the tool.
> Ah! That is exactly my problem I now realize. My paper in and of itself
> does not use Helvetica but I am using
> gnuplot to generate figures. So, I guess I am going with (2). The use of
> Helvetica in the figures is so
> small that hopefully any difference will be so small as to be
> undetectable. I am willing to bet that Helvetica is a
> common enough font and gnuplot is a common enough tool that this
> shouldn't be an issue. We'll see...
> And also, just for the record, I found these directions on embedding
> fonts to be very clear:
> http://confsys.encs.concordia.ca/public_files/embeded_fonts.php
> Thank you very much for the help!
One final thing. I just discovered a clever workaround.
For the entire document run pdf2ps
pdf2ps document.pdf
and the run this command on the ps file
ps2pdf14 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress document.ps
This seems to work for embedding the fonts without having to regenerate 
anything!



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