Type 1 font problem
Allin Cottrell <[email protected]> Sat, 20 Jan 2018 13:31:07 -0500 (EST)
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.tex.pdftex |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I'm having trouble displaying certain PDF files created by pdflatex and incorporating proprietary Type 1 fonts. I have access to two Linux systems, call them A and B, and the deal is that PDF files created from the same sources on either system display correctly on system A but not on B. The symptoms of incorrect display are: using xpdf, text appears but is seriously wonky (missing glyphs and curious blotches), while using evince no text is displayed and I see "error occurred in libfreetype" on stderr. The two systems have these characteristics: A: Fedora fc26 pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.17 (TeX Live 2016) (preloaded format=pdflatex 2017.2.7) LaTeX2e <2016/03/31> libfreetype.so.6.13.0 B: Arch (fully updated 2018-01-20) pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.18 (TeX Live 2017/Arch Linux) (preloaded format=pdflatex) LaTeX2e <2017-04-15> libfreetype.so.6.16.0 The Type 1 font families I'm trying are Adobe Caslon, Bulmer MT, Bembo, Bodoni MT, Baskerville MT and Scotch Roman MT. In each case I'm using the same, simple LaTeX document for testing. Of these fonts the first two provoke the problem on System B while the other four display correctly on both systems. None of the files provoke any error when examined by pdinfo or qpdf (though I know these are not rigorous tests). And to be clear, all of the test files (all fonts, PDF produced on both A and B) display perfectly correctly on System A in both xpdf and evince. Moreover, I've been using all of these fonts in LaTeX for many years without any problem and it's just recently I've noticed that they're not working on System B. I tried the experiment of replacing System B's libfreetype with that from System A, but that didn't make any difference. Then I tried running System A's xpdf binary on System B: again, no change in outcome. Clearly there's something in the PDF rendering stack on System B that is choking on some of the files. I guess this could be because (a) some of the PDFs are actually broken according to spec, but the rendering stack on A is somehow more fault-tolerant and succeeds in working around the brokenness, or (b) the PDFs are OK and there's a subtle breakage somewhere in the rendering stack on B (but apparently not in libfreetype). Anyone have an idea on how I should proceed to get a more useful diagnosis? Thanks in advance. Further info: at http://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/t1problem/ I've put screenshots of good and bad (xpdf) renditions of my test file, plus the source fonttest.tex and sample output fonttest.pdf using Adobe Caslon. -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University