Re: font substitution by acroread
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).
Controlling font embedding is very easy in windows applications (such
Acrobat Distiller) but not that easy under Linux (in OOo Writer there is
no option for that so we can't select what fonts we want to attach into a
PDF document and which ones we want to be "linked").
>> Sometimes, the original document ("Microsoft® Office Word 2007" as
>> shown in the PDF properties) makes a reference to a typeface but is not
>> used in any part of the document so when performing the conversion to
>> PDF the font is still referenced but "not visible" at all.
>
> That would make sense, if for instance you had a serif and a sans
> default fonts defined, and only used serif -- which appears to be what's
> happening with this particular document.
>
>> I think this can be the case.
>>
>> > Portable Document Format indeed.. or does the 'P' still stand for
>> > proprietory..? :-)
>>
>> It's a nice format, standard et al,
>
> 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) :-)
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.
>> (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:-)
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
Reply to: