Re: compilation is stuck! (problems with postscript fonts on unix)

["George N. White III" <gwhite@emerald.bio.dfo.ca>]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Uwe Koloska wrote:

> [...]
> Why do you use the URW name for palatino?  AFAIK the URW font is an exact
> replacement for the adobe one (in terms of metrics) and so teTeX uses the
> adobe names for the standard 35 postscript fonts and only substitutes the
> pfb-files.
> 
> So with my (regarding to fonts) non modified teTeX beta the adobe names
> has to be used for the standard 35 postscript fonts:
> 
> \definefontsynonym [Palatino-Roman]             [pplr8t]  [encoding=ec]
> \definefontsynonym [Palatino-Italic]            [pplri8t] [encoding=ec]
> \definefontsynonym [Palatino-Slanted]           [pplro8t] [encoding=ec]
> \definefontsynonym [Palatino-Bold]              [pplb8t]  [encoding=ec]
> \definefontsynonym [Palatino-BoldItalic]        [pplbi8t] [encoding=ec]
> \definefontsynonym [Palatino-BoldSlanted]       [pplbo8t] [encoding=ec]
> 
> Uwe

The URW fonts are _NOT_ exact replacements for the Adobe fonts.  Even
worse, Adobe switched some of the fonts supplied in Acrobat Reader 4
(e.g., Arial and TimesNewRomanPS for Helvetica and Times-Roman).  Many
PostScript "clone" printers also do font substitutions.  These are 
usually harmless, but if you compare the same page from different
printers of the same resolution you can see differences in weight.

I suspect the URW fonts were pre-existing high-quality fonts and have been
scaled to approximate the metrics of the original Adobe "Laserwriter 35".
In any case, the glyphs are not the same and some metrics differ (if you
compare AFM files), so if you are being careful you would want to use URW
metrics rather than Adobe metrics.

Arial-Italic is a "real" italic, while Helvetica-Oblique is a 
synthetic font.  I've enountered far too many cases where a figure
was created using Windows and Arial-Italic, which is changed to 
Helvetica-Oblique in the EPS file, but gives different appearance
(in particular, slanted '|[]()' glyphs) on some printouts but
not for everyone.  At a Win95 corporate site where the systems
are supposed to be configured to one "standard", some systems 
use PCL and some AdobePS to print on the same HP printer models,
resulting in different output from Acrobat Reader 4.

If I want to avoid such problems the easiest strategy is to embed the URW
fonts in the PDF or PS, although I still use Adobe fonts when I want
minimal file size and think I can avoid the worst problems. In figures
(where Helvetica is commonly used) I generally convert fonts to outline
paths for annotations.

Current software makes it very hard for most users to know what
fonts they are actually using.  I favor the "full-disclosure"
approach where you get exactly what you specify.  

Ghostscript 6.01 currently refuses to embed the base 13 fonts. 
I think the "todo" list includes implementing "AlwaysEmbed",
but I haven't checked it in a recent beta.

-- 
George N. White III <gnw3@acm.org> Bedford Institute of Oceanography