Re: [tlug] Broken PDF printers and Closed fon spots

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

Hi Francois,


On 08/09/11 01:37, Francois Cartegnie wrote:
> > About this first question of your's, do you mean that PDF files
> > generated within Linux were printed at 7-11 printers and you now look
> > at the printouts and found the text wrong?
>
> New document printed to postscript&  converted to PDF using ps2pdf (because
> they don't handle postcript). Nothing unusual.
>
> > Sorry, but I haven't encountered the font problems exactly like
> > your's, though...
>
> Especially annoying because it can only be detected by close check.
> ( or if you only print binary :) )
>
> I bet for an escape sequence triggered by the "0", but no more clue.


In this kind of situation, I would actually turn to Windows 
(or Mac, or even someone else's Linux system) to see if the 
problem is the printing or the file.  I guess we're assuming 
it isn't a problem with the file?

Are these files generated using LaTeX?  I sometimes bounce 
back and forth between dvips/ps2pdf, dvipdfmx, or pdflatex. 
 Sometimes one works better than the other.  I haven't had 
the patience to work out which is better in which situation, 
though...


> > I think if you have the original PDF documents, you can view its
> > properties to see if all fonts are available.  If these were generated
> > by LaTeX, then there is also a way to have the fonts embedded in the
> > document.
>
> And what do you suggest as safe fonts for those systems ?


I don't have "safe fonts" to suggest in LaTeX; there's a 
list of fonts which are free which would probably be good 
choices.  For a long time, I was using Helvetica, and then 
it was a while later before I realized it wasn't free (it's 
just the systems I used it on had it so I had no problems 
viewing it).

However, instructions from others [1, 2] do mention how to 
embed fonts into the PDF file.  This prevents the viewer 
from substituting fonts, just in case its choice isn't very 
good.  I presume you can't embed non-free fonts...not too 
sure about this.

Ray

[1]  http://wand.net.nz/~iam4/latex.html
[2] 
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2005/08/29/getting-pdflatex-to-embed-all-fonts/