[vox-tech] LaTeX, DVI, PDF, LaTeX, fonts - HELP!

[Henry House]

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On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 03:12:36PM -0700, nbs wrote:
> I've just been informed that some documents that are being generated
> by LaTeX aren't printing properly on some printers.
>=20
> I think it's less a problem with the printers (HP-850s) and probably
> more a problem with Acrobat on the system (all of these are Windows boxes=
, BTW)
> that the printer happens to be connected to.

I have seen this. I suspect Acrobat too. All versions of Acrobat that I have
seen fail to properly implement Type 3 bitmap fonts to Adobe's own spec. DVI
files converted to Postscript or PDF use such bitmap fonts.

> On one box, printing to a laser printer, the document appears correctly.
> On the other box, printing to the HP-850, the fonts aren't right
> (sans-serif instead of serif).

Are these printers under your control? Can you test them? The sans-serif fo=
nt
is likely the default font of Acrobat, scaled and tweaked by Adobe's font
magic to the same spacing and aspect ratio of the original document fonts.

> Is there some way of embedding the fonts into the PDF document so that
> Acrobat will work correctly?  Or perhaps is Acrobat missing something
> or misconfigured?

See above. The fonts are there, but Acrobat cannot deal with them.

> I've tried sending "-dNOPLATFONTS" to my call to 'dvipdf', but the
> PDFs generated with and without that option were indentical in size.
> (Unfortunately, >I< don't have the problem, people on the other side
> of the country do, so this is mighty hard to test/debug. :^( )

Try:

	* Using pfdlatex instead of latex to typeset the documents. The output
	  will be in PDF format, so no DVI->PDF conversion will be necessary. If I
	  am not mistaken, pdflatex always uses the Blue Sky type 1 versions of
	  Computer Mondern rather than the bitmap originals. (It always does on my
	  system.) One way to check this is by running pdf2ps on the pdflatex
	  output and inspecting the postscript code in an editor. You will see the
	  fonts impedded and may analyse them.

	* Using pslatex instead of latex; output will be DVI but using the
	  standard postscript fonts, which every PDF viewer and every printer
	  driver support perfectly. The typographic quality will be degraded, so
	  try the previous suggestion first.

--=20
Henry House
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