[Tugindia] Type 3 fonts problem

[David Kastrup]

harishankar ramachandran <hsr@tenet.res.in> writes:

> I have a strange problem I want help on.
> 
> 	Platform: RH Linux 7.2
> 	tetex version: 1.0.7
> 	xpdf version: 0.92
> 
> I wrote a paper in TeX and converted it into pdf to submit for a
> conference.  My litmus paper test is to see if xpdf can display it,
> since I have yet to see a file that displays correctly under xpdf but
> gives problems on other viewers/platforms. 
> 
> I used
> 
> 	\usepackage{pslatex}
> 
> to enforce Type 1 font usage (so I thought), and when I ran Latex
> and dvips, the output was correct. 'gv' could display the file
> properly.

That does not enforce Type 1 font usage.  It just enforces the usage
of certain fonts.  Whether those will turn out to be Type1 or Type3
depends on what you have installed on your system, and with what
configuration you call your converters.

> However, running ps2pdf created a file that xpdf claimed was full of
> Type 3 fonts, and it did not display correctly.

ps2pdf calls GhostScript, and for generating nice PDF, you should not
go below version 7.0.  The versions you specified above for other
software make it strongly likely that your version of GhostScript is
simply too old for writing nice PDF.

> When I instead ran 
> 
> 	divps -Ppdf -o paper.ps paper.dvi
> 	ps2pdf paper.ps paper.pdf
> 
> I now got a file that was correctly viewable by all three (though xpdf
> still complained about Type 3 fonts) except that all 'fi' sequences were
> replaced by the pound symbol.

Known bug in dvips (fixed just pretty recently).  Call it with option
-Ppdf -j0, or change the j option in config.pdf accordingly.

BTW, decide yourself.  Above you wrote that dvips lead to bad
fonts, here you say it leads to good ones.

> To summarize:
> 
> =================================================================
> pslatex | -Ppdf | gv    | xpdf  | acroread      | windows        
> =================================================================
> no      | no    | ok    | blank | ok            | does not print 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> yes     | no    | ok    | errors| ok            | ?              
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> yes     | yes   | fi    | fi    | fi error      | ?              
> =================================================================
> 
> Running dvipdf did not help, and pdflatex is not an option, since I
> have a number of eps files I would rather not tinker with.

epstopdf is available for that purpose.  Again, you should have a
reasonably recent GhostScript installed or you'll get inferior
results.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David.Kastrup@t-online.de