[Deque Undoc for PDF Beta] Re: Tip of the Day: Lions and Tigers and Type 3 Fonts, oh my!
- From: "Bill Diamond" <bill.diamond@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <deque-ubeta@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 11:16:21 -0400
The new OpenType specification merges some features from both TrueType and
Postscript. On the outside, it looks and acts like a TrueType font, but the
outline specifications are postscript type 2 definitions. You can consider
this a superset of both TrueType and Type 1 fonts. While you don't have to
have Adobe Type Manager to manage your fonts anymore, I honestly don't
recommend doing this. Fonts take up a huge amount of memory. Personally, I
don't have a good enough memory to recall which font sets I use for which
projects. That's where ATM makes a big difference for me. That's just a
personal thing.
The newer OpenType fonts supporting hinting, ligatures, full Unicode
support, glyp positioning and substitution, and some advanced features that
have been exposed in InDesign and Photoshop. Just to make your life more
exciting, Adobe and Microsoft decided to switch encoding schemes from either
Type 1 or Type 3 to Type 2. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Type 1
fonts supported up to 256 characters. OpenType faces support up to 65,000
characters. Yes, this does mean that the OT faces can have swash letters in
the set itself. On the face of it, the visual enhancements to OpenType
should encourage anyone still using Type 3 to migrate to OT foundry faces.
But, thanks for not asking about SVG fonts yet. I'm not quite ready for
that myself.
I started migrating from Type 1 to OpenType fonts about a year ago. Like
most of you, I have a pretty large library of Type 1 fonts. The hardest
task wasn't supporting the new OT faces. It was going through my system and
making sure that whenever I had a Type 1, OT or TT font face that I removed
any other versions of the same face. That's reduced a lot of my headaches
and made my printer a lot happier to not see pesky TT font faces sneaking in
the back door when I send over a packaged job.
If you're really up against a wall and pretty handy, you might look at some
of the open source efforts. One product that's out there is called
FontForge, which comes out of a Russian font foundry. The tool does its
best to convert TrueType, Type 1, some Type 3 to OpenType and SVG Font
format. Personally, I'd probably stick with Fontographer.
Regards,
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: deque-ubeta-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:deque-ubeta-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard P Frehs
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 7:54 AM
To: deque-ubeta@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Deque Undoc for PDF Beta] Re: Tip of the Day: Lions and Tigers and
Type 3 Fonts, oh my!
Bill,
Your tip sheet on fonts was welcome; especially after the problems I had
with fonts last week. I was at first baffled with the error message of "out
of memory" from opening a previously used file in InDesign. All
documentation that I could associate with this problem pointed to bad fonts.
Our organization uses fonts from the Universe family and we install Adobe
Type 1 in the Font folder located on the operating system. Is it true that
Adobe latest font is the open type used for both screen and press?
Rich Frehs
*********************************
Richard P. Frehs
U.S. Geological Survey
6480 Doubletree Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43229-1111
Phone: (614) 430-7719
FAX (614) 430-7777
rpfrehs@xxxxxxxx
"Bill Diamond"
<bill.diamond@xxxxxxx To:
<deque-ubeta@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
om> cc:
Sent by: Subject: [Deque Undoc
for PDF Beta] Tip of the Day: Lions and Tigers
deque-ubeta-bounce@fr and Type 3 Fonts, oh my!
eelists.org
05/26/2004 05:06 PM
Please respond to
deque-ubeta
Back in the earlier years of Postscript font design, the late 1980, Adobe
kept the design and architecture of the Type 1 family to itself. It
encouraged third party houses to develop fonts using Type 3 technology
instead. Type 3 was pretty popular as it was somewhat easier to design
fonts for and had some extras that Type 1 didn't, like the ability to embed
itself directly in the postscript output or to force characters to be drawn
as bitmaps or even to use bitmaps as elements in the fonts.
Type 3 fonts, though, had their drawbacks. Most notably, they couldn't be
managed with Adobe Type Manager. One concept that seemed like a great idea
at the time is a real liability when you're trying to make a document
accessible. That concept was the ability to download outline fonts as
bitmap fonts. From a pre-press perspective, Type 3 fonts sometimes post
major stumbling blocks when trying to rasterize a PDF for print - a process
usually referred to as "ripping".
One hint that you're facing a Type 3 font challenge is when you try to tag a
PDF and you get an odd error message that "too many unknown font encodings
encountered". This generally suggests there's a significant problem with
the use of Type 3 fonts and that Acrobat, which uses Type 1, OpenType, and
TrueType fonts, can't handle. So, what's the Undoc user to do?
You do have a variety of options. Certainly, if you can - try to get your
hands on the missing Type 3 fonts. Once those are installed, you may have
more success. Your second approach is a bit more taxing. It's likely that
your fonts have been subsetted within the PDF. This means that the
underlying postscript code that lurks inside your PDF has the postscript
instructions necessary to draw the characters that were used. If this is
true, you may be able to extract that font subset and recreate it.
Products
like Macromedia's Fontographer can help you here. This is a process called
"font stripping".
To extract the troublesome fonts, save the PDF as an EPS file within
Acrobat. Use a text editor to open the EPS and looking for a line that
begins with
"%%BeginResource: font ...". Copy that line and everything below up to and
including the line that starts with "PDFVars /TermAll get exec end end".
Copy these lines into a new text file with the name of the font that you're
going to recreate. Remember to make sure you get the file name extension
right! This is platform specific, and on the Macintosh you'll need to get
the correct Type and Creator codes. Open the file with a font editor and
recreate the missing font. It probably won't be the full set of characters;
most people who create PDFs only subset the minimal set they need within the
PDF to reduce the file size and to respect the property rights of whoever
created the font.
Once you have all the fonts recreated and installed, you may then be able to
use the Acrobat Touch Up Text tool to try to change the font used.
In this case, "may be" is a cautionary statement. One feature of Type 3
fonts that I spoke about earlier was how these fonts could be drawn as
bitmaps - and this is also true when documents using such fonts are printed,
including to PDF, or to postscript that is then distilled into PDF. It is
quite possible to find that when the PDF was generated the fonts were
embedded as graphics. That can produce a better looking document that
behaves better as a PDF when it's scaled or resized, but what it produces is
a graphic element that's generated by the postscript programming language.
It's not a file with embedded text and associated styles and markups.
You can test your PDF with Adobe Acrobat by exporting the text in the file.
Use Acrobat's "File->Save As" menu and export to text. When you open the
text output you should see, well, text. Lots of text. If you don't see
text, but see lots of odd chacters like square boxes, tildes, and single
digit numbers, you probably have a postscript file with embedded Type 3 font
use to generate characters programmatically.
When you encounter this kind of a problem, there's still one thing you can
try. Go back into Acrobat and save your PDF as TIFF using the "File->Save
As" menu. Then, use an optical character recognition (OCR) tool to try to
recreate the file.
Bill
________________________
Bill Diamond
Director of Marketing and Alliances
Deque Systems (http://www.deque.com <http://www.deque.com/> )
11180 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 400
Reston , VA 20191
+001 703 225-0380 voice
+001 703 225-0387 fax
877-OK-TODAY USA Free Call
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