Re: font substitution by acroread

[Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 08:02:42AM EST, Steve Kleene wrote:
> 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 know have the time right now to check whether this works with
pdf's, but you could try to adapt this:

→ Add the following to /etc/fonts/local.conf:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
  <!-- Get rid of hard-coded Arial & Sans-Serif in web pages. -->

  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="prefer_outline">
            <bool>true</bool>
    </test>
    <test name="family">
            <string>dejavu sans</string>
    </test>
    <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
            <string>Verdana</string>
    </edit>
  </match>

  <match target="pattern">
    <edit name="prefer_outline">
            <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
------------------------------------------------------------------------

→ As root, recreate fontconfig cache:

  # fc-cache -r -v -s

→ As regular user check the results:

  $ fc-match arial
  verdana.ttf: "Verdana" "Normal"

Obviously requires that your version of acroread for linux invokes
fontconfig to serve the fonts.

CJ