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rendering Postscript fonts



On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:05:59 -0400, I wrote:

> Groff makes the PS, and then I use gs to make a PDF.  What I believe is that
> people reading this document (likely on Windows) will call up their local
> font definitions when they view this.  These definitions are used to draw the
> characters, but the spacing is all defined by the PDF.  Is that correct?

On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:07:16 +0200, Florian Kulzer replied:

> That depends on whether the fonts are embedded in the PDF. ...

The results of the tests you suggested were interesting.  Looking first at
the PS made with groff, I found no fonts shown as
"%%DocumentSuppliedResources:", except for one that was in the figures.  This
must have been embedded by Illustrator, which I used to create the figures.
There were no instances of "%%DocumentFonts:", and only the font in the
figures showed as "%%BeginResource: font".  The main text fonts (the four
Palatino fonts) were shown as "%%IncludeResource:".

Then I made the PDFs with gs.  Adding "-dEmbedAllFonts=true" didn't affect
the results, as I gather it is the default.  In Acrobat, the four Palatino
fonts showed as "Embedded Subset".  The Symbol font, which I did use, was
not shown as embedded for some reason.  pdffonts gave the same results.

For fun, I then changed the "internalname" line in
/usr/share/groff/1.18.1/font/devps/PR from "PalatinoLinotype-Roman" to
"Zalatino" and remade the PS and PDF.  The text was no longer justified in
either the PS (viewed with gv) or the PDF (viewed with Acrobat whether XP or
Debian).  I suspect that the intercharacter spacing is correct but a
different font was substituted.  I had guessed that if the font were
embedded, it wouldn't matter what name was assigned.  But apparently I
guessed wrong.

Since Grants.gov accepts PalatinoLinotype, and since it's on all XP setups,
I should be fine.  The documents viewed with Acrobat look OK.  But I
wouldn't say I understand all of this just yet.

Thanks.


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