slightly OT concerning pdf's

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-01-29 at 10:05 +0100, Nils Kassube wrote:
>> Ric Moore wrote:
>> > Our Non-Profit staff created a pdf file for me to put on our website.
>> > I'm seeing spaces between some of the words. I opened the pdf in
>> > Ocular and xpdf, and they both look the same. So, I installed Adobe
>> > Acrobat Reader. The effect is less pronounced. Is there some
>> > difference between the way a PDF document is created in Windows that
>> > shows up using Linux? I'm thinking it might be a proportional font
>> > causing it, I dunno. Ric
>>
>> I think the font used by the creating application is not installed on
>> your machine and is therefore replaced with a similar looking font which
>> is installed on your machine. You can avoid such a problem if you embed
>> the used font during the creation of the file but usually that isn't
>> done because it increases the file size.
>
> As a postscript, here's the ~real~ giggle. Using Adobe to view the pdf,
> it pops up an announcement box that states I need to install Japanese
> Fonts in order to view the document correctly.

This COULD be the problem -- you should check the source document (the
one someone "printed" to PDF) and see what font they used. You can
also check the PDF properties (using that feature in Evince or Acrobat
or whatever viewer) and see what font it is reporting.

I suspect the font either IS a "Japanese" font (and the source
document is using the Roman glyphs), or Adobe doesn't find it in its
database and picked a Japanese one that was similar.

The safest thing to do is either pick a font just about everyone has
or is well defined (Times, Helvetica, Courier, or even Arial) or pick
a font that can be embedded so there is no question about it
displaying properly.

You may even find that the document has different sections and even
whitespace encoded in different fonts. If this is a document that has
been passed around among lots of authors over the years, there could
be who-knows-what in it.