At Thu, 30 Dec 2004 00:49:49 +1100, Michael Lake wrote: > I have a server and I'm using pdflib to generate a PDF file and sending > back to a user. At home it all works fine. But on the server when I > create the PDF and view it ALL the text is missing. Even if I download > the PDF file there are no fonts. > > I think I need some debian font package but what one. There are so many. > Its a Debian system and it is not running XFree or any X. > > Any idea what font package to install so the libary can find a plain > times-roman and a helvetica to embed?
Ok. PDF (like Postscript) has 14 "base" fonts that are assumed to exist in any reader and there is no need to embed them. Courier, Helvetica and Times Roman are in those base 14. A very simple tool for finding out what fonts are referenced and/or embedded in a PDF is "pdffonts" that comes with xpdf (its in the xpdf-utils Debian package). For example, a simple pdftex-generated PDF I happened to have handy gives: /tmp% pdffonts intermezzo.pdf name type emb sub uni object ID ------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- --------- XSSGUM+CMR12 Type 1 yes yes no 6 0 LDZDIG+CMR10 Type 1 yes yes no 9 0 Note the "emb" column showing that both these type1 fonts are embedded in the PDF. (The random name prefix is a PDFTeX workaround for a bug on MSWindows Acroread) So what you should do is run pdffonts on your PDF file. Either you have forgotten to embed some fonts that need to be (ie: any fonts outside the base 14) and only some of your viewers have access to the font through other means (its installed elsewhere on your filesystem); or you are using the base fonts and your xpdf is unable to find its installed version of them (from the gsfonts package on Debian) and your PDF file should work fine elsewhere. From the error message you mention in another post, I'm suspecting the latter. Try fixing/removing your ~/.xpdfrc and see what happens. -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
