From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Nick Dokos Subject: Re: a bit offtopic, fonts in exported PDF documents Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:44:20 -0400 Message-ID: <19838.1282862660@alphaville.usa.hp.com> References: <4C76A590.9050800@ccbr.umn.edu> <4C76D92E.1060308@ccbr.umn.edu> Reply-To: nicholas.dokos@hp.com Return-path: Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=45896 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1OolBT-0004JL-1A for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:44:39 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OolBL-0000Il-FI for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:44:34 -0400 Received: from g1t0026.austin.hp.com ([15.216.28.33]:9924) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OolBL-0000IJ-AJ for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:44:27 -0400 In-Reply-To: Message from Erik Iverson of "Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:14:22 CDT." <4C76D92E.1060308@ccbr.umn.edu> List-Id: "General discussions about Org-mode." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: Erik Iverson Cc: nicholas.dokos@hp.com, emacs-orgmode Erik Iverson 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