Re: Ms. problem

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:38:19 -0500, Ph. D. <phild@...> wrote:

> Paul Bennett said:
>>
>> Certainly with Adobe Acrobat, you can set it up to
>> include special characters as graphics (i.e. you can
>> say "include text in fonts X, Y, and Z just by
>> specifying the font name, but include text in fonts
>> I, J and K by outputting the graphics for them"). I
>> suspect that the PDF printer mentioned above could
>> do it, too. As a last resort, you can check the
>> "print text as graphics" option on the Printer Setup
>> dialog. You'll make a bigger PDF, but PDF includes
>> some fairly good compression to cope with that.
>
> I thought the whole idea with making PDFs was that
> they encoded the source fonts, so the end reader didn't
> need to have those fonts installed. If you have those
> characters in the fonts you use to create the PDF, I
> would expect them to show up correctly in the end
> document.
Including a full or partial glyph set from a font is optional with PDF,
and with Acrobat it can be set at PDF-creation time. I have produced a few
documents without embedding the correct fonts, only to have my remote
readership mumble and grumble.

Also, PDF allows for some quite sophisticated font metrics information,
which means that you very often do not need to worry at all about fonts,
either their presence, or their embedding. The Acrobat reader at the other
end has its own repository  of fonts, to which it applies embedded font
metrics information, if present. Have you ever viewed a PDF on-line, and
noticed text first appears, and then a moment later changes font slightly?
That's Acrobat rendering a close approximation font first, before it has
downloaded the embedded font information, to get you something readable as
quickly as possible.





Paul