Follow-up Comment #4, bug #66342 (group groff): On Sunday, 7 December 2025 14:13:40 GMT G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Follow-up Comment #3, bug #66342 (group groff): > > At 2025-12-07T05:53:27-0500, Dave wrote: >> Follow-up Comment #2, bug #66342 (group groff): >> >> The gropdf man page implies gropdf can generate only PDF versions 1.4 >> or 1.7, neither of which appears to mandate embedding of the base 14 >> fonts. (The relevant passage of the pdf 1.7 reference is quoted at >> http://stackoverflow.com/q/57443300.) > > The PDF/A-1a (accessibility) standard appears to mandate this property, > but I could only find testimonials that this is the case, not the spec > itself. > > https://pdfa.org/pdfa-faq/ >
Gropdf has never claimed PDF_A conformity, so embedding all fonts is still
only "best practice", not a requirement. I am against removing the -e flag
from gropdf since it will stop any make files which users have written which
use the flag abort. Although the fix is easy (remove the flag), personally, it
annoys me when developers change their command line to something which is no
longer compatible, so I don't want to do it for others.
There are still valid reasons for not embedding the base-14 fonts. It produces
the most compact pdf, so is kinder to mailing lists etc.. Most unix systems
will have compatible Times-Roman and Helvetica fonts which the pdf reader will
use (unless you fiddle with fontconfig too much to force it to favour a font
you personally like rather than a truly compatible font. The issue with the
"em" character which Alexis had with his viewer is because the emdash glyph in
whatever font it was using had the same width but included side bearings (a
small gap so that adjacent glyphs do not touch/overwrite each other). Our URW
based fonts have no side bearings for emdash. A font designer may decide it
looks better, when placed between two glyphs, if there is a slight gap,
particularly since unicode now has U+2015 (horizontal bar) for the purpose we
are using emdash.
I agree it would be good to help our users to achieve "best practice", which
is why I advise using "export GROPDF_OPTIONS=-e" in the shell start-up file.
It is the same with people suggesting that pdf should be the default
typesetter, there is no need, simply set GROFF_TYPESETTER=pdf to achieve what
you want, there is no need to change how groff has always worked to achieve
what users want.
Thanks very much for the suggested patch Branden, but I don't want to change
the gropdf command line by removing the -e flag. Since this is important, that
people know what is "best practice", perhaps you can suggest suitable wording
to include in our documentation.
Cheers
Deri
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