Re: ps2pdf with non basic fonts

[Reimer Behrends]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 02:44:24PM +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> >ps2pdf is part of both the gs and gs-aladdin 
> 
> BTW, do people know if this utility currently deals well with 
> fonts not in the built-in set? It used to do some nasty things 
> for non-basic fonts.

Ps2pdf in its current incarnations (6.5x and later) deals fairly well
with embedded fonts insofar as they are included and displayed properly
(with some exceptions, such as Type 3 fonts). Older versions sometimes
replace outline fonts with bitmapped version.

There is a substantial problem, however, in the handling of recoded
fonts. Recoding includes a "definefont" operator, and the pdfwrite
driver does not realize that that two fonts encoded in the same way are
identical and need not be duplicated. As a result, each page will have
its own subset of the embedded font, substantially increasing PDF
output size.

My usual solution is to hack LoutRecode for this, as well as change
all its uses throughout the PostScript output, so that duplicate
fonts are recognized and not recreated. (I also get rid of save
and restore operators, as they used to have similar problems.)

Other than that problem, ps2pdf does an excellent job.

Alternative solutions are PStill [1] or Adobe's Online Distiller [2].

                        Reimer Behrends

[1] Shareware, http://www.wizards.de/~frank/pstill.html; not without
    the occasional problems, but font embedding doesn't have the
    aforementioned problems.
[2] $10/month, http://createpdf.adobe.com/, currently only available
    in the US and Canada