TECH: Re: PDF correction?

On Apr 27, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Roger Mills wrote:
> I've received a pdf from a colleague which has some typographical
> oddities
> w.r.t. IPA characters. Is there any way for me to make corrections
> or to
> determine what was meant? I don't know what font was used
> originally-- I've
> asked him, but it's an old paper so he may not remember.....
If you have the actual Acrobat program (not the reader alone), you
can probably make changes, unless the colleague locked down the file.
I guess there are several PDF editors (which I found just now by
googling "PDF editor"), but I don't know if any are free, or how well
they work.

>
> Among them are: ® (r in a circle) for (perhaps) glottal stop
> (though ? shows
> up correctly elsewhere) and ¡ (inverted !) for (I think) the velar
> nasal
> (which also shows up correctly elsewhere). These don't seem to be
> usual
> substitutes for Unicode chars., in my experience. (Plus one or two
> others--
> nothing crucial, but it's annoying......)  I think these oddities
> appear
> mainly in the footnotes, not in the text. Any idea why that would be?
Probably the footnotes use a different font.

On Apr 27, 2007, at 3:12 PM, David J. Peterson wrote:

> I've had lots and lots of problems with IPA characters in .pdf's.
> A lot of times, it was 50/50 if all the IPA characters were going
> to come out when you printed it.  The only thing I can recommend
> is to download a different font and try again.  Usually when
> thing's like this happens, it's the font's problem (something in it
> didn't allow it to embed correctly), and switching the font can
> fix the problem.
Roger doesn't know what the right font would be. Is there any way to
look inside a PDF and find out what fonts it actually requests? I
imagine that's possible if you have Acrobat itself, but are there any
free/open source tools for that? (I've also run into a few PDFs where
either the characters didn't show up right, or a dialog box came up
saying I needed to install certain fonts, which makes me grumble just
a little bit, since I thought the point of PDF was to be able to
distribute formatted text without worrying about the specific fonts
and programs the receiving end has.)

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