[emacs-wiki-discuss] type 3 fonts in planner and muse PDFs (was: planner.el questions, suggestion for planner.pdf)

[Maciej Kalisiak]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 12:46:37AM -0400, Angus Lees wrote:
> Acrobat has had problems for a long time with displaying type3 fonts
> acceptably.  Try another PDF viewer, such as xpdf or one of the
> ghostscript wrappers and the fonts should look better.

True, xpdf is a bit better (the fonts are not blurry anymore) although it does
have problems lining the glyphs up properly on the baseline (it uses bad font
metrics?)  It's not a problem for me personally, as I can always regenerate
the PDF, so I merely pointed it out thinking more of the casual user which may
want to check out planner and will by default use acrobat (of course they are
likely then to check out HTML version instead, so this is not a big deal).

> Also note the 'pdffonts' command which comes with xpdf (Debian
> "xpdf-utils" package).  This will give you a similar listing to the
> acrobat font properties dialog - the names of the fonts should be
> munged forms of the TeX font name (the munging is a workaround for
> another acrobat bug..)

Ooooh, thanks, good to know, I'll check it out.  Hopefully it also will show
whether the fonts have been subsetted and embedded.  Paper publishers tend to
require this now, and it is a pain to load up acrobat 20 times in a row while
trying to figure out why a given font hasn't been embedded yet...

> It should be reasonably simple to see which fonts are being embedded
> as type3 and then its a somewhat complicated exploration to find out
> why the type1 wasn't available.  Assuming Sacha is building these PDFs
> on a Debian machine with standard pdftex.map files, I should be able
> to help given the output of pdffonts and 'dpkg -l tetex\*'.

In case it is of some use, I attach a note from my ~/Plans daily page (planner
is slowly becoming part of my heavy-use toolset, yay!) with my notes on the
font type 3 problems that I've encountered with planner and muse (also some
nice hyperref customizations for "muse"):

  .#1 fuzzy (Type 3) fonts in PDFs

  Found this interesting tidbit which explains why muse PDF output uses Type 3
  fonts, and possibly why Sacha's planner.PDF is also fuzzy:
    http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=fuzzy-T1

  Thus muse's README.pdf can be fixed by either commenting out the
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, or, assuming that one may want to use those Cork
  extension glyphs, I found that I can just install "lmodern" (Debian package,
  T1 encoding of Computer Modern, called Latin Modern), and adding
  \usepackage{lmodern} to the preamble.

  Hmmm, but there seem to be CM T1 fonts (bluesky) already in package
  tetex-extra... why weren't those used for README.pdf?

  Ah, found out that I can use the virtual T1 fonts from tetex-extra by using
  \usepackage{ae}.


  Some other interesting things I found:

      usepackage[colorlinks,hyperindex]{hyperref}

      % suppress the ugly colored boxes around the active parts of the text.
      \def\pdfBorderAttrs{/Border [0 0 0]} % No border around links.

  Manual for 'hyperref':
    http://www.tug.org/applications/hyperref/ftp/doc/manual.html

  The following options work nicely:
    \usepackage[hyperindex,linktocpage,colorlinks,breaklinks]{hyperref}


-- 
Maciej Kalisiak       mac "at" dgp.toronto.edu       www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mac