font substitution by acroread
I often come across PDFs containing Arial font (as reported by pdffonts from
poppler-utils). For example, this one:
http://cdmrp.army.mil/funding/archive/10prmrpiira_pa.pdf
When I view these in acroread (8.1.7-0.1, lenny), I get some font that's
really horrible to read. The upper-case letters are about 4x taller than the
lower-case letters.
I don't have Arial on my Lenny system, so I assume that another font is being
substituted. I don't know how this works. By checking file-access times, I
found that a very large number of font files are touched when I open the PDF.
Files touched are, among other places, under
/etc/fonts
/usr/lib/Adobe/Reader8/Resource/Font
/usr/share/fonts
/usr/share/texmf/fonts
I can imagine two solutions but don't know how to execute either one. First,
I could arrange to have a sane font (e.g. Helvetica) substituted instead of
whatever one I'm getting now. Second, I could perhaps make Arial available
on Lenny. I have already installed ttf-liberation, which has "Free fonts
with the same metrics as Times, Arial and Courier". I have an XP virtual
machine with files such as c:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf. I'm not sure how to
add and register the TTF files on Lenny, and I'm not sure if that would solve
the acroread problem. I'd appreciate any suggestions.
P.S.
Here's another odd thing. If I bring up an all-Arial PDF in XP Acrobat and
save it to a PDF, the copy PDF does display nicely in Lenny's acroread.
pdffonts shows the original as follows:
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
Arial,Bold TrueType no no no 6 0
Arial TrueType no no no 8 0
and the copy as this:
DMLCMG+Arial-BoldMT Type 1C yes yes no 45 0
DMLCNH+ArialMT Type 1C yes yes no 47 0
Thanks.
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