Re: Font embedding

From: luigi scarso <luigi.scarso@gmail.com>
To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: Font embedding
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:36:21 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAG5iGsCKRhJhSrk+wttF5z=-j7e0i84f-4pkYxSgoy_wBVQO8w@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <357A5FBE-5496-41E3-A363-00E983ADAF33@fiee.net>

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:38 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm <hraban@fiee.net> wrote:
> Am 2012-02-28 um 21:23 schrieb Martin Schröder:
>
>
>> 2012/2/28 Honza Hejzl <honza.hejzl@gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> PDF file must be version 1.3
>>
>>
>> Yellow pages. Now. Choose one that can handle PDF/X-4.
>>
>> PDF 1.4 was released in 2001. If they need 1.3, their software is
>> probably a decade old.
>
>
> No, they just keep to standards they can handle. There’s not so much wrong
> about PDF/X-1 and -3.
right. After all, many of tex user still use dvitops and pstopdf.
>
> I guess the "full font embedding" is just a misunderstanding. The
> instructions Honza quoted didn’t say "full".
yes, this is what I believe
>
> I experienced a lot of printshops whose instructions were for office-type
> laymen and just utterly wrong for professionals*, e.g. to deliver single
> page pdfs or to convert all fonts to curves. Other printshops never learned
> anything in the last 20-30 years - they earned their insolvence.
>
> *) or, say, people who know stuff - most *amateur* (in the meaning of the
> word) typographers are better than everyday professionals.
or \input zapf

>
> Honza, I guess you need only this information: ConTeXt embeds fonts very
> well and standards compliant. If it doesn’t, it’s an error that we can track
> (maybe missing or corrupt font on your system).
Right -- at least this is  my almost 10 years experience of industrial
printing with mkii and mkiv.

The only obscure issue with fonts embedding is the fact that at least
for pdf1.4
it was a "bad practice" (let's says so) to embed one of the 14
Postscript "standard" fonts
Courier,Courier-Bold,Courier-Oblique,Courier-BoldOblique,Helvetica,Helvetica-Bold,Helvetica-Oblique,Helvetica-BoldOblique,Times-Roman,Times-Bold,Times-Italic,Times-BoldItalic,Symbol,ZapfDingbats
(the  Base-14 Fonts)
but pdf/a-* which is pdf 1.4 based requires that all the font *must*
be correctly embed, even one of the Base-14 fonts.
So, a pdf1.4 with, let's say, only helvetica correctly embed, can be
theoretically marked as "bad" (not wrong, just bad) if checked versus
a generic 1.4 version compliant,
but right (at least form the point of view of fonts) if checked as pdf/a-1 .
But it's so dependant to the pdf-checker that we can say that if the
last release of Acrobat say it's ok, than you can say that it's ok.
(incidentally, that's why in this situation I use Nimbus whenever I
can, to avoid such kind of noises).

-- 
luigi
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