At Fri, 25 Jul 2003 09:45:04 +1000, Michael Lake wrote: > Mark A. Bell wrote: > > The PDFs that I produce look beautiful in GhostView at home, but > > when I open them in Acrobat for Windows, the fonts look hideous! I > > don't much care because the printed copy looks great - better > > than I could produce with Word, with so much less frustration. > > Its most likely caused by having type3 fonts (bitmapped ones) in your > document. They can be quite good in resolution even 1200 dpi and Acrobat > 5.0 and below will rebder then shithouse.
I concur. > > Why does this happen? Is it because the (expensive) laser-printer at > > work has the right fonts programmed into it, but regular Windows > > desktops don't? > > The fact that it prints OK but renders poorly on screen is the classic > sign that you have type3 fonts in your document which acroshit renders > badly. Open Acroread and under File/Document Properties it will list > your fonts. I bet they are "type3". You can also use the "pdffonts" tool from xpdf on Linux. Most likely the fonts you were using were derived from METAFONT fonts (.mf), converted to .pk and then embedded as type3 (a bitmap font format). If you can find/use a type1 version of these fonts (.pfa or .pfb) or even a truetype version, then you can embed them directly in the .pdf. These formats are rendered correctly by acroread. The progress output from pdfTeX or dvipdfm should also give you an indication about which formats are being used. (The default Debian tetex install should prefer vector fonts over bitmap fonts, and should correctly embed them. Try installing the "tetex-extra" package if you haven't already) > > Should I worry that if I try to print on a different printer, I might > > get an incompatible font? Should I somehow install more fonts on my > > Linux box? I'm running Debian Unstable. > > You shouldnt need more fonts. I am still myself working out how to > convert my setup to use Type1 fonts and thats prob the best way to go as > then Acroreader on Windows will render it OK. > Fonts in TeX are hard I think. Installing new fonts under TeX is indeed hard. Its pretty much entirely automatable though - and I'm trying to do that with a tetex defoma script currently.. Once this is working, you should be able to register your type1/truetyp fonts with defoma and it will "just work" :) (a Debian/tetex -specific solution I'm afraid) Mark, I'm happy to give better explanations/solutions if wanted. I'll need to know exactly what TeX tools you're using to generate your .pdf though (and sample input/output from them). -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
