Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on March 24, 2004 08:32 AM
This is a useful article in many respects but has some rather misleading or erroneous information too.
The Optimize parameter has no effect (in ps2pdf).
The UseFlateCompression parameter is set to true by default in every standard configuration and so is hardly worth mentioning unless one, for some reason, wants to turn it *off*.
The section on Embedding Fonts is completely wrong. Take a PDF that displays "fuzzy fonts" in your Acrobat reader on Linux and open it in gv or xpdf or a version 6 Acrobat Reader on Windows. No fuzzy fonts! So the fuzziness doesn't come from the "unique set of fonts" used in TeX or from "lower quality bitmapped fonts" substituted by ps2pdf; it comes from the Acrobat reader itself (versions less than 6). Nobody seems to know for sure why Adobe did this and I know that one shouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but some have suggested that Adobe was simply trying to sell more of its type 1 fonts.
In any case, to work around this undesirable feature of the Acrobat Reader, one must avoid embedding type 3 fonts. For TeX/LaTeX users, this means configuring dvips to produce Postscript using type 1 fonts only; ps2pdf will then embed the type 1 fonts into the pdf and the fuzziness in the Acrobat Reader will be gone.
The real reasons to embed or not embed fonts in a pdf have to do with the size of the pdf versus its faithfulness to the original. If a font is used in a document and not embedded, the pdf will be smaller but another font may have to be substituted by the reader. The differences between Times and Times New or between Helvetica and Arial are minor and can often be ignored. This is why the "standard 14" fonts are normally *not* embedded. But in high-quality pre-press situations, *all* fonts should be embedded, not to avoid fuzziness but to be faithful to the original.
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some misleading information
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 24, 2004 08:32 AMThe Optimize parameter has no effect (in ps2pdf).
The UseFlateCompression parameter is set to true by default in every standard configuration and so is hardly worth mentioning unless one, for some reason, wants to turn it *off*.
The section on Embedding Fonts is completely wrong. Take a PDF that displays "fuzzy fonts" in your Acrobat reader on Linux and open it in gv or xpdf or a version 6 Acrobat Reader on Windows. No fuzzy fonts! So the fuzziness doesn't come from the "unique set of fonts" used in TeX or from "lower quality bitmapped fonts" substituted by ps2pdf; it comes from the Acrobat reader itself (versions less than 6). Nobody seems to know for sure why Adobe did this and I know that one shouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but some have suggested that Adobe was simply trying to sell more of its type 1 fonts.
In any case, to work around this undesirable feature of the Acrobat Reader, one must avoid embedding type 3 fonts. For TeX/LaTeX users, this means configuring dvips to produce Postscript using type 1 fonts only; ps2pdf will then embed the type 1 fonts into the pdf and the fuzziness in the Acrobat Reader will be gone.
The real reasons to embed or not embed fonts in a pdf have to do with the size of the pdf versus its
faithfulness to the original. If a font is used in a document and not embedded, the pdf will be smaller but another font may have to be substituted by the reader. The differences between Times and Times New or between Helvetica and Arial are minor and can often be ignored. This is why the "standard 14" fonts are normally *not* embedded. But in high-quality pre-press situations, *all* fonts should be embedded, not to avoid fuzziness but to be faithful to the original.
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