Re: First impressions: strange groff default font behaviour after system upgrade

[Dave Kemper]

On 12/18/23, Oliver Corff via <groff@gnu.org> wrote:
> I tried to compile my minimal document again, with all combinations of
> -e, -F /usr/share/fonts/urw35-base/ but nothing changes. The PDF file is
> always 11771 bytes long. Embedding a font or a glyph should make a
> difference, or not?

Embedding a font will definitely change the file size.

Groff's options can be confusing because some apply to groff itself
and some to the postprocessor.  If you give groff the -e option, that
tells it to run the input through eqn.  To get embedded fonts in PDF
output, you need to give the postprocessor, in this case gropdf, the
-e option.  From groff, you can specify postprocessor options via -P.
So specifying -P-e to groff sends the -e option to gropdf, which will
then embed the fonts.  With this you should see the changed file size.

> This prompted me to send the pdf to a different device, and voilà! there
> everything shows up as intended!
>
> groff 1.23.0 is acquitted. That's good news.

Indeed.  But you still may want to give groff -P-e to make your file
more robust, letting it work with a wider range of PDF viewers.