[texhax] PDF produced by pdflatex rejected by Lulu.com
Pierre MacKay
pierre.mackay at comcast.net
Fri Feb 10 06:46:54 CET 2012
On 02/09/2012 11:34 AM, Tom Bishop, Wenlin Institute wrote:
>> Has anybody either:
>> a. successfully printed LaTeX documents with Lulu? or ...
>> b. had similar problems? Solutions?
>
> We've had Lulu.com ship the "same" book to two addresses, one book printed correctly, and the other incorrectly. This happened to us with pdf files made using pdftex (plain TeX not LaTeX) with lots of embedded fonts. The characters in problematic fonts were simply blank in the badly printed books; the file was not rejected. Evidently Lulu.com does not always use equivalent printers or drivers. Solutions might be to avoid unusual fonts, normalize your pdfs somehow, and have all books shipped to your address for quality control inspection before shipping them elsewhere.
>
The lost character syndrome is very interesting, because it is something
I have frequently experienced. Is there any chance that all the lost
characters belong to the Adobe Expert Encoding set? Dharacter
disappearance will always happen (so far as I know) in a file produced
with a non-Adobe distiller. There is no place in Unicode for most of
what appears in Adobe Expert Character encoding, and so Adobe has
basically abandoned it, but not told you about the decision. If I
remember correctly, fonts using Adobe Expert Encoding are rendered
properly in Reader 6, but produce spaces in Reader 7. What Adobe has
done is provide a truly Byzantine workaround, but you can only benefit
from that if you use either Adobe on-line distiller (what I use) or buy
the grossly overpriced package that gives you the same capabilities in
the Adobe Acrobat Professional software combination. (Warning: If you
do decide to use the Acrobat Professional package, and have occasion to
change your OS, you are out of luck. You have to pay the full cost of
the replacement package all over again.) Ghostscript provides no
solutions, and I am afraid I doubt that pdflatex has even thought about
the problem.
Pierre MacKay
Pierre MacKay
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