Re: [Groff] (no longer anything to do with) groff_ms.man

[Larry Kollar]

"Stewart C. Russell" <address@hidden> wrote:

> .... Distiller 3 & 4 have a convenient
> bug in font subsetting and inclusion that means that distilling/diluting
> (?? - well, what's the word for pdf->ps?) are not entirely reversible. ...

Distilling. Think whiskey (and the need for it after using Acrobat).

> Because of this, and only becuase of a sharp-eyed preflight op at our
> printer, we very nearly printed a dictionary in sTuDlYcApS. It looked
> okay on our screens.

I'm *so* glad I finished my beer before reading that. Good
beer is hard to come by in the US, and spraying it all over
my monitor would have been seriously bad form.

Acrobat only embeds the parts of the fonts that the document
actually uses; I'm not sure how your PDF got knackered (is that
the word?) but it probably had something to do with embedding
the fonts.

There are issues with font licensing that you have to be aware
of when you include fonts. It's not a problem if you have all
Adobe fonts, but some other foundries have licenses that forbid
including all or part of their fonts in a PDF.

Finally, using the Distiller PPD while creating the PostScript
file reduces the number of little surprises from Distiller. That's
something that comes up again & again on Framers (the FrameMaker 
users' list). Windows users are fond of using File -> Save as PDF
to generate their PDFs, and that seems to select any PPD *but*
Distiller's. It got to the point where one of the Adobe people
reading Framers wrote a nice little screed that he posts about
twice a month: "before you ask, DON'T DO SAVE AS PDF." :-)


> I as also at a presentation about PDF where one of the speakers (I can't
> remember who) said that it was possible to create a PDF according to the
> specs that Adobe Acrobat Reader (4, I think) wouldn't touch.

Not Shlomo Perets, by any chance? Also, I wouldn't expect that 
you could configure Distiller to pull that particular stunt.

I will say, though, we still create Reader 3.01-compatible PDFs
at work. The new features aren't compelling enough to force our
customers to upgrade. I think I have Acrobat 5, but I don't think
I've actually installed it.


-- 
Larry Kollar   k o l l a r  at  a l l t e l . n e t
"Strange that people always suggest commercial systems when the
phrase 'mission critical' comes up." -- Sebastian Rahtz, on XML-Doc