No Problem with Acrobat 5 or 6

and output from DVIPSONE and Distiller

• NO SURPRISE:
  PDF files made using the Y&Y TeX System and Acrobat Distiller (4, 5 or 6) work just fine
  

• WHY BOTHER MENTIONING IT?
  PDF files produced using some free software tools no longer work in Acrobat Reader 5.0
  PDF files produced using some other TeX systems no longer work in Acrobat Reader 5.0 .
  

• WHO IS CONCERNED ABOUT THIS?
  See discussions in the comp.text.tex and comp.text.pdf news groups
  See discussions on the "pdfTeX" and "TeX Fonts" lists.

• WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
  There are hundreds of thousands of journal articles made using Y&Y TeX and Acrobat Distiller online.
  It would be disasterous if these no longer worked.

• HOW DID Y&Y GET SO LUCKY?
  Luck has nothing to do with it.
  With ten years of experience with fonts, PS rasterizers and ATM, we know what common programming errors appear again and again in other peoples software, so we are careful to program around these.
  

• WHAT DOES Y&Y DO TO PROTECT ITSELF?
  DVIPSONE alone has literally dozens of "work arounds" for programming errors that have appeared in PostScript rasterizers, PostScript clone interpreters, Adobe Type Manager, graphics software, different versions of Windows etc.

• THE SUBRS ARRAY MAY NOT BE SPARSE.
  This requirement is stated in an Adobe document "Adobe Type 1 Font Format" version 1.1 (August 1990) (no longer found on their web site) in section 10.3 on page 85 of the T1_SPEC.PDF):
  
  "The integer immediately following /Subrs must be exactly the number of entries in the Subrs array."
  
  "Only Subrs entries may be defined until the Subrs array is completed."
  While this requirement has not always been enforced in every Adobe software component,
  it is required by a number of Adobe components as well as some non-Adobe consumers of Type 1 fonts.
  This is an example of a restriction in the specification that is not obeyed by some competing products.
  

  HOW ABOUT THE FONTS?
  Y&Y fonts are top quality, hand hinted, fonts in ATM compatible Adobe Type 1 format.
  There are no problems with the fonts and Acrobat 5 or 6.
  

  SO WHY MENTION FONTS?
  Some public domain software, and some other TeX products,
  package the fonts in a PDF file in a way that Acrobat 5 Reader has a problem with them.
  The resulting PDF files cannot be printed from Acrobat 5 Reader.

  IS DISTILLER FREE OF BUGS?
  No, like all non-trivial software there are likely to be bugs.
  However, Distiller has been remarkable free of significant bugs for software of such complexity.
  Alternative means of creating PDF do not come close.
  Putting articles online is not a time to be taking chances...

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