[OS X TeX] OT: help with font embeddings

[Stephen Moye]

On Feb 8, 2006, at 5:17 AM, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 09:55:03PM -0500, Jan Anderssen wrote:
>>
>> the issue this time is that despite the editors promises lots of
>> papers had missing fonts, and the final pdf got rejected by our  
>> printer.
>>
>> my questions are:
>>
>> (i) how can i find out which fonts are problematic for the printer? i
>> assume any base35 fonts shouldn't be, but there are lots of different
>
> I don't think you can assume that. Sometimes printers use a rigid
> set of requirements. E.g. they have a preflight program to check
> pdfs and a preflight configuration which says what things are to be
> flagged as illegal. The trend is to require really ALL fonts to be
> embedded.
>
>> (ii) is there a way to embed fonts "after the fact"?
>
> Sometimes it helps to convert a pdf to PostScript using pdftops from
> the xpdf suite, and then re-distill the resulting PostScript.
>
>> i guess there's maybe a third question:
>> (iii) what's the worst case scenario if the file gets printed?
>
> That depends on the printer.
>
> 1. They (or their software) may refuse to print the job
> 2. They scan printed output
> 3. You get some fonts printed as Courier
>
> I mentioned the xpdf suite. After installing Tiger, I compiled it
> from source on a fink-free system, but forgot to document the
> process. Is currently anybody doing any work towards an xpdf
> ipackage?
>
> -- 
> Siep Kroonenberg

Funny you should say that -- I just installed some of the xpdf tools  
(pdftops,
pdftotext, pdfimages, pdfinfo and pdffonts): it was a simple install  
requiring
only that the xcode tools be installed. The package from foolabs will  
not
install xpdf and pdftoppm because (I discovered when running ./ 
configure)
FreeType and Motif could not be found. That was odd because I did  
install
FreeType using the i-Installer. I gather, however, that xpdf itself  
is a previewer,
as well as a gui interface for the other utilities, so that is not  
really necessary.
pdftoppm might be nice however...

In short, I have also been wondering if we could get an i-package out  
of this,
though I hesitate to burden Gerben any further... :>}

In any event, the tools that were installed are extremely useful and  
work as
advertised. Do install version 3.01, as version 3.00 has a nasty font  
bug.

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