LaTeX & type 1 fonts (Was: Re: [OT] Re: PDF woes)

On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 04:23:48PM -0500, Peter Clark wrote:
[snip]
>    I'm pretty sure the problem is that Acrobat Reader (at least version 4)
> cannot handle Type3 fonts in an intelligent way. I have not checked out version
> 5, because, as you so eloquently point out, the open source stuff is superior.
[snip]

Thanks a LOT, Peter Clark :-) Yesterday, after a lot of investigating
around and experimentation, I discovered that this was precisely the
problem.

So I played around and found that my LaTeX installation (teTeX) already
*has* type 1 fonts for Computer Modern, and that my installation of TIPA
also already has type 1 fonts. So, after some configuration tweaking, I
managed to get most of the postscript with type 1 fonts -- however,
probably because I use the dotless \i and \j plus a few other diacritical
marks, some fonts were still being loaded as type 3. Soon, I found out
that the missing fonts were the EC (European Common?) fonts. A little
search on the web turned up the cm-super package, which contains all the
missing stuff from the default type 1 CM fonts.

And so *finally*, I got to the point I can produce a PDF that uses only
type 1 fonts, and it looks MUCH better on Acrobat Reader!

However, I did notice that at low magnifications some glyphs still show up
as rectangular blobs. I'm not sure why this is so -- zooming in shows the
correct glyphs, but at the default magnification, some characters in
footnotes show up as ugly blobs. Oh well... this *is* acrobat 4 after all.
Perhaps they fixed this in 5.

(P.S. Now, I'm just wondering what will happen if I start making my
conlang's script using METAFONT... AFAIK there is no easy conversion from
METAFONT to type1... *sigh* Is there a sane type 1 font creator for
Linux?)


T

--
Don't modify spaghetti code unless you can eat the consequences.

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