PDFs are not printed with the correct fonts

Question

Using pdflatex I create some official PDFs from LaTeX source with \usepackage{mathpazo} or even just with the normal CM fonts and they look fine on my screen both, in Preview and in Adobe PDF Reader.

However when I am printing them at Officeworks (a stationary and printing shop chain), the fonts are wrong: They get substituted with a generic Helevtica font with different metrics.

How can I make sure that any printer will print my LaTeX PDF correctly?

@ChristianHupfer How can I make sure fonts are embedded? And if I have to flip a switch for this, why is this not the default setting? — halloleo, Jun 20 '15 at 09:40
@ChristianHupfer And: The mathpazo package uses Palatino. - Isn't this a Standard Adobe font, which, I would have thought, is supported by any printer? — halloleo, Jun 20 '15 at 09:41
Open the document with a pdf viewer and show the document properties. Most viewers list the embedded fonts, e.g. evince. — MaxNoe, Jun 20 '15 at 09:54
@MaxNoe Adobe Reader tells me under the Fonts tab: LMRoman 10 regular and similar are "Used in this Document". - that's strange I use CM fonts! (no font package used at all.) — halloleo, Jun 20 '15 at 10:03
Have you asked the printing shop guys? They are supposed to have some insight into their equipment. Maybe it is a known problem. — Johannes_B, Jun 20 '15 at 10:05
This discussion would be abbreviated if you post an actual pdf and the MWE used to generate it. There are reported problems at all stages (including failure of printing to use embedded fonts). — Aubrey Blumsohn, Jun 20 '15 at 11:18
mathpazo uses a clone of Palatino - not Palatino itself. If fonts are substituted, the software is likely not to substitute Palatino but, rather, some generic default. That said, it really shouldn't matter if the fonts are embedded but sometimes it does. If the fonts are embedded, ask the print shop why they are not getting used. — cfr, Jun 21 '15 at 14:09
@Johannes_B That's what it was: The printers at OfficeWorks are dodgy - nothing I could do about in the PDFdocument. — halloleo, Jun 21 '15 at 23:07

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

I do not know which is your system --- in TeXLive pdftex should embed all fonts by default since ages. In the linked article you can see it.

To check, I used this MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{mathpazo}
\begin{document}
This is just an example $a^b-\sqrt{c}$.
\end{document}

and with the utility pdffonts:

[romano:~/tmp] pdffonts example.pdf
name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
ZEXUQE+URWPalladioL-Roma             Type 1            Custom           yes yes no       4  0
QCVMKP+URWPalladioL-Ital             Type 1            Custom           yes yes no       5  0
SVEOTC+CMSY10                        Type 1            Builtin          yes yes no       6  0

which seems to give the correct answer --- look at the "emb" (embedded) column.

Thanks for the tip to check with pdffonts. The fonts are embedded. It was a problem with the hardware: The printers at OfficeWorks must be dodgy. When I printed it at another place (university) it worked fine. — halloleo, Jun 21 '15 at 23:09

PDFs are not printed with the correct fonts

1 Answers1