Re: "Writing my PhD using groff"

[Dave Kemper]

On 7/25/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm out of my comfort zone here; expertise from PS/PDF gurus is welcome.

I'm hardly a guru in this realm, but I did have to untangle this
problem once, so I have some relevant knowledge.

I've found giving ps2pdf the "-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer" flag does the
trick.  My limited understanding of PDFSETTINGS is that it's an
umbrella switch that flips several other switches.  I have this
comment in my conversion script:

# Further, setting PDFSETTINGS to /prepress or /printer automatically sets
#  - EmbedAllFonts to true
#  - SubsetFonts to true
#  - MaxSubsetPct to 100
#  - Downsample*Images to false
#  - MonoImageFilter to /CCITTFaxEncode

So there's probably some combination of individual switches that will
embed fonts, but -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer works for me, so that's what I
use.

Font embedding only works with PDF version 1.3 or later.  To maximize
portability, I force version 1.3 since I don't need any features from
later versions.  So I can't guarantee that any of the above still
holds when generating later PDF versions, but it might at least give
you a starting point for experimenting.

I've found http://www.volkerschatz.com/tex/hiqpdf.html a useful
resource for arcane ps2pdf options.