Re: font substitution by acroread
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 04:09:22PM EST, Camaleón wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:44:55 -0500, Chris Jones wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 12:13:42PM EST, Camaleón wrote:
> >> On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:58:39 -0500, Chris Jones wrote:
> >
> > [..]
> >
> >> The whole document uses "Times News Roman" :-)
> >
> > A cursory glance via evince tells me that you are probably right about
> > that, but how can you be sure of it -- with all the font substitution
> > that goes on behind the scenes, I mean..?
>
> Yep, not an easy task.
>
> I mean, the only way I see to know what fonts are being used in a
> document is by reading the meta information (font properties) from a PDF
> reader but that is not indeed definitory as fonts are simply
> "listed" (i.e., you cannot know that one paragraph uses Times News Roman
> and the next paragraph changes to Garamond).
I was wondering if there was anything more reliable than just looking.
For instance, I could have sworn that the http:// links in the pdf we
are discussing used a sans-serif font. I went again through the entire
document looking for text that did not use Times New Roman and I could
not find anything.
What I vaguely had in mind is that you select a given string or
paragraph, and you have an option called "Properties" maybe, that tells
you everything about said string/paragraph, including the font family,
style, etc.
[..]
> > Well, it's officially an open standard since 2008, but then, the PDF
> > version of the document is 1.6 and that dates back to 2005 or
> > thereabout.
>
> The older the PDF spec used in a document, the better (more
> compatible) :-)
Hm.. meaning that any version is guaranteed to be backward-compatible,
but the newer the version the more "features" it may have? ;-)
> I had some problems with old versions of Ghostscript when trying to
> convert/manipulate PDF documents conforming PDF 1.7v. It just crashed,
> which forced me to update GS.
>
> >> but a good reader makes the PDF user experience better or worse,
> >> and Acrobat Reader is not the one that helps in that "better
> >> experience" task :-P
> >
> > I suspect it's because it's meant to attract customers to buy their
> > non-free (as in beer) software.
>
> Yes, but I find Acrobat Reader a bit "bloated". Nevertheless, there
> are still some documents that require Acrobat Reader (some goverment
> signed PDF form files) that cannot be successfully filled with Evince
> or Okular, for instance.
Ah.. good to know. I have it on this system, but when I need to quickly
take a look at the contents of a pdf, I usually fire up epdfview.
> >> (IMO, Evince or Okular are far better than Acrobat)
> >
> > Hm.. While I'm at it let me take a peek at Okular. That's going to
> > be a large install, since I don't have any KDE stuff on that system.
>
> For users running a KDE environment, Okular is a really nice app. But
> as I'm using GNOME I'm stick to Evince. I don't like mixing libraries
> from both DE O:-)
I installed it to take a quick look, and it looks quite mature. But, as
usual with QT stuff, widget fonts are much smaller than GTK's, and even
the rendering of fonts in the documents is not optimal. Actually, on my
system, Times New Roman looks like a bad clone of itself rather than the
real thing. My guess is that you need the KDE display configuration tool
to tweak the rendering, and I'm not going there :-)
Thanks for your comments.
CJ
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