Re: A trigger for buggy Acrobat behaviour

[Berthold Horn <bkph@ai.mit.edu>]

At 01:08 AM 6/15/98 -0700, Melissa O'Neill wrote:

>I believe I have found a cause for buggy behaviour in Macintosh Acrobat
>Exchange software when used with ATM Deluxe 4.0 (under System 8.x); this
>bug may also manifest itself in other configurations.

Excellent detective work!  Congratulations.

>In PostScript, it is okay for an encoding to reference a glyph which is
>not actually in the font -- doing so is like refering to the .notdef
>glyph. However, it appears that such reencoding in PDF files causes
>problems for Mactintosh Acrobat 3.01 and/or ATM Deluxe 4.0.

I assume that this is not due to the lack of a /.notdef character?
Some `sub fonting' schemes strip out the /.notdef since 
`it is not needed'...

>The fix for this problem should be quite easy. PostScript drivers can
>change the way they reencode fonts: Instead of using a single encoding
>vector, which may include glyphs that aren't in the font, the driver
>must arrange to generate a custom encoding for each font -- one that...

Of course, the real fix is to get Adobe to fix Acrobat!  But we all know
how much influence we have on that process...So the suggested 
work-around is most welcome.

>P.S. I don't claim that this is the only bug in the Macintosh Acrobat Reader.

:-)