From: Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>
To: Erik Iverson <eriki@ccbr.umn.edu>
Cc: nicholas.dokos@hp.com, emacs-orgmode <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: a bit offtopic, fonts in exported PDF documents
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:44:20 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <19838.1282862660@alphaville.usa.hp.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Message from Erik Iverson <eriki@ccbr.umn.edu> of "Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:14:22 CDT." <4C76D92E.1060308@ccbr.umn.edu>
Erik Iverson <eriki@ccbr.umn.edu> wrote:
> For those that don't want to read all that follows, please note my
> conclusion, given here:
>
> Since orgmode is automatically telling latex to use T1 encoding,
> perhaps we should somewhere document to the user that Type 1
> fonts should be available to get the best looking PDF possible.
> Otherwise, type 3 fonts will be substituted. I got suitable
> Type-1 fonts by installing the texlive-fonts-extra package
> under Ubuntu.
>
[With apologies for the length (and the further off-topic direction) of
this post, I hope the following is of interest to a few people. Those
of you who have no interest in the finer points of TeX fontological history
can safely hit "Delete" now.]
I think the conclusion is substantively correct, but there are a couple
of minor nits: I would leave out the first line of the second paragraph
above ("Since orgmode...T1 encoding,"). I would also note that the problem
is a viewer problem, not a Type3 problem (see below). Here's why:
* Type1 fonts (e.g. the Adobe Postscript standard fonts) are implemented
as scalable outlines, basically programs that describe what the glyph
will look like. It's easy to tell the program: draw this glyph at
1.41421 the size (or whatever other scaling factor you want), hence
"scalable".
* Type3 fonts are usually bitmaps (that's actually an oversimplification, but it's
true in the vast majority of cases), so you need a multiplicity of
them at different sizes to cover the needs of a document.
Both of these (and presumably the missing Type2 as well, although I have
never seen one of those) were defined by Adobe.
T1-encoding has nothing to do with Type1 fonts except for the
unfortunate similarity of the names: an encoding is just the table that
translates from numbers to glyphs in a font. Knuth used a very peculiar
encoding originally (now called OT1) and in 1990, the TeX people got
together at Cork, Ireland, and hashed out this new encoding (it was
called Cork encoding for a long time, but at some point it became
"T1"). The T1-encoding *is* pretty much the encoding that Adobe used for
*its* fonts (whether Type1 or Type3). In particular, there were
T1-encoded Type3 fonts (the so called EC fonts, in their original
incarnation, before they were auto-traced and made into Type1 fonts) and
there are non-T1 encoded Type1 fonts (in particular, T1-encoding deals
with text, mostly European languages that use the Latin alphabet or
slight variations thereof, so Cyrillic, Greek, non-European alphabets
and symbols of various kinds have their own encodings: whether a font
for any of these would be Type1 or Type3 is a matter of implementation.)
Here are some links of interest from the TeX FAQ:
"What are encodings?" http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatenc
"What are the EC fonts?" http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ECfonts
"Adobe font formats" http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=adobetypen
This last one (and a link therein to PDF quality) is of particular
interest, because it describes the situation when Acrobar Reader
(version < 6) exhibited exactly the problem that you encountered with
Evince. Acrobat Reader has been fixed since then so it deals with Type3
fonts reasonably, but I guess Evince still mistreats Type3 fonts (they
may believe in the motto that "All the fonts (that matter) are Type1".)
Cheers,
Nick
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-08-26 22:44 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-08-26 17:34 a bit offtopic, fonts in exported PDF documents Erik Iverson
2010-08-26 18:02 ` John Hendy
2010-08-26 21:14 ` Erik Iverson
2010-08-26 21:49 ` Markus Heller
2010-08-26 22:07 ` Erik Iverson
2010-08-26 22:50 ` Markus Heller
2010-08-26 23:08 ` Nick Dokos
2010-08-26 23:38 ` Nick Dokos
2010-08-26 22:18 ` John Hendy
2010-08-26 22:44 ` Nick Dokos [this message]
2010-08-26 21:37 ` Alan L Tyree
2010-08-26 21:40 ` Erik Iverson
2010-08-26 21:41 ` a bit offtopic, fonts in exported PDF documents - oops Alan L Tyree
2010-08-26 21:46 ` Erik Iverson
2010-08-30 7:43 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-08-30 14:50 ` Nick Dokos
2010-08-30 15:12 ` Erik Iverson
2010-08-30 15:58 ` Nick Dokos
2010-08-30 19:04 ` Joost Kremers
2010-08-31 6:31 ` Carsten Dominik
2010-08-31 6:51 ` Nick Dokos
2010-08-31 7:09 ` Carsten Dominik
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