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I use a script to use LaTeX equations in Adobe Illustrator documents via the standalone document class. Apparently, this produces Type 1 fonts, and recently I got the message that from January 2023 these Type 1 fonts are not supported anymore in Adobe and (apparently) operating systems will follow later.

Therefore, I was wondering how this Font 1/Font ?2,3,4...?-stuff is 'arranged' in LaTeX (I'm a true noob when it comes to fonts etc.) and if you can have control over this, such that my nice latex-infused Illustrator documents are not screwed after January 2023.

NB. I build the standalone document with pdflatex

seaver
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    pdf's with embedded type1 fonts as produced by pdflatex will continue to work in PDF readers (it would be madness to change that, there a millions of documents using such fonts in the archives), but you will not be able to edit such a PDF's. See https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html – Ulrike Fischer Sep 01 '22 at 16:10

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Type 1 font is used in pdfTeX because of traditional TeX has the limit that each TeX font has at most 256 glyphs, while today most TTF or OTF fonts have more than that, so a mechanism of mapping is required to use these fonts, and due to the mapping was largely built on the Type 1 font concept, the limited TTF support in pdfTeX makes it more desirable to convert these files to Type 1 font first.

PostScript Type 2 is not an actual font format, it is a compression scheme. The same scheme is used in OpenType fonts but you won't yet need to worry about it.

Type 3 is font again, when raster font format was drawn in (and usually you won't like that to happen) you would see that, and you could use them with TeX if you are still targeting PostScript output. Most softwares would not support this, as it is something leftover in PDF standard.

Other numbers are either not actually font formats or only used for printer hardwares, and not related to TeX that much.

If you use XeTeX or LuaTeX that supports directly loading modern fonts from the system there are OTF versions of Computer Modern, which enables you editing them normally in Adobe programs. But after all Type 1 and Type 3 are just part of PostScript and as long as Illustrator keeps PostScript editing support you would still get albeit limited editing capability to them, like editing curves, change colors, it is only just these would not be treated as regular fonts so you would not able to retype them with the text editing tools in Illustrator.

LdBeth
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  • "there are OTF versions of Computer Modern" <-- can you please tell us where to find these? – Phil Nelson Oct 15 '22 at 19:06
  • CTAN links: New Computer Modern, Latin Modern, CM Unicode. – Apoorv Potnis Oct 15 '22 at 19:34
  • I found one answer to my question: https://ctan.org/pkg/bakoma-fonts – Phil Nelson Oct 16 '22 at 10:39
  • my illustrator no longer recognized the fonts at all, so they are displayed as little squares of unknown stuff to it. Would you kindly explain how to use XeTeX or LuaTeX to compile a pdf that I can open in illustrator? When I compile my document using those I get some nonsense, but I installed the bakoma otf in my windows folder. If this should be a separate question please let me know. – Lotte Oct 19 '22 at 23:03
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    @Lotte If you use fontspec package with either XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, it should be easy, see 2.2 of https://texdoc.org/serve/fontspec/0 – LdBeth Oct 20 '22 at 14:50