Re: PDFs on PCs

In message <avPnj.34173$a61.5177@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"Charles Duckworth" <charlesd@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Specifically, each and every letter 'l' was darker and bolder
than all the surrounding text - they may have been emboldened or just
horizontally distorted, I don't know.

This is a "feature" of Adobe Reader and is not a fault of the PDF
file. It is a rendering "optimization" for axis aligned rectangles,
which is what the letter "l" in, say, Homerton, turns out to be when
represented as a shape. Why Adobe thought it was a good idea is beyond
me, it looks terrible.

I'm confused here. I have been producing my Chemistry teaching notes on a
RPC and !Publisher for almost 15 years using the Homerton font. Over the
last 3 years I have been converting them to PDF for viewing on a Windows
network using Adobe Reader. I have had no such problems.

Of course. The above only applies when text is exported as shapes.
Note the wording "represented as a shape" above. If you have normal
text on the page in Homerton, everything is fine.

So what does this mean to us mortals? You suggest that Homerton font has
been read / interpreted wrongly

No, not at all. Everything is working correctly, except that Adobe
Reader chooses to properly anti-alias all shapes except axis aligned
rectangles, so text converted to shapes can look odd if it features
rectangular glyphs.

but I have not seen this fault. Is it something to do with the
Homerton font (and others) supplied, or the operating system that is
converting them? Were the original RPC fonts (circa 1993) of Type 1?

No, nor are the ones we currently have, but that does not matter
because the standard fonts (e.g., Homerton) are not embedded anyway.

There seem to be two related errors here. The first one is easy to see
and reproduce: Rectangular glyphs in text that has been converted to
shapes look odd in Adobe Reader. Obviously, for those it does not
matter of which type the font is because we are no longer dealing with
text but with shapes. If you convert Homerton text to shapes and
export it as PDF, then the "l"s will stick out in Adobe Reader.

The second error is more difficult to pinpoint: If text is exported to
PDF, then rectangular glyphs rendered in fonts embedded in Type-3
format sometimes suffer from the same problem (see Kell's message),
but this does not always happen. That latter, less frequent error can
be avoided by avoiding Type-3 fonts in the PDF file (i.e., by using
fonts that have Type1 files).

The general advice is that if you want high quality text rendering in
Adobe Reader, then either use high quality fonts with Type1 files
(e.g., EFF Publisher Fonts) OR use the standard fonts (Trinity,
Homerton, Corpus, Selwyn, Sidney and a few others) and make sure they
are mapped by the PostScript driver (this is the default setting so if
you have not deliberately changed it you need not worry about it).

Martin
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