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I coauthored a book that I want to publish in India. The Indian publisher said "some of the fonts are not embedded in the PDF file shared". They sent me a screenshot of the problematic fonts (Item 1).

The book pdf is created with pdflatex (version info in Item 2).

I created a minimum working example (listing is Item 3, screenshot is Item 4).

The Linux pdffonts command run on my MWE, as well as the book seems to indicate that the fonts are embedded (Item 5).

pdftexDownloadBase14 true is set in /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf/web2c/updmap.cfg

My question is - is there a problem with my pdf? Specifically, does Acrobat seem to say that the font is not embedded (which I take encoding: custom to mean), while pdftools says it is?

The font issue must be related to the fact that I'm using packages like skull (see MWE) and clock. The book itself has a large number of fonts (28 Type 1) and (10 Type 3) - pdffonts shows all the Type 3 fonts show as embedded (like Item 5 below) and all being with [none] for the name - can anyone tell me if this is significant?

Item 1: Pothi's feedback

Feedback

Item 2: Tex Version

[adnan@Adnans-Mac-mini]/Users/adnanaziz 1333 pdflatex --version

pdfTeX 3.1415926-2.4-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012)

Item 3: Minimum working example

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{skull}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
Hello World. $\skull$
\end{document}

Item 4: Acrobat screenshot of MWE:

skull

Item 5: pdffonts ouput on MWE:

name type emb sub uni object ID

LAGHAY+CMR10 Type 1 yes yes no 4 0

[none] Type 3 yes no no 5 0

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adnan
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    I think that the problem is not that these fonts are "not embedded" (I think they are!) but instead that they are Type3, which usually means "bitmapped", and thus low quality for printing in high resolution (although this depends on the resolution at which the fonts were rendered when created). – JLDiaz Feb 01 '13 at 00:09
  • It cannot be from the external picture because the MWE exhibits it, and the MWE is trivial (not including any picture). – adnan Feb 01 '13 at 00:18
  • Skull seems to be available only as metafont so there is nothing you can easily do to prevent the bitmap font in your pdf. The symbols itself (as a bitmap) should be included, though. – sebschub Feb 01 '13 at 08:46
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    I believe sebschub has identified the issue correctly. Now I am trying to design my own Type 1 skull font and embed it. Alternately, I'll see if I can get get an existing Type 1 skull symbol from a font family. They seem to be out there (e.g., http://www.fontspace.com/category/skull), I just need to figure out how to use them with LaTeX. – adnan Feb 04 '13 at 16:05

1 Answers1

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[To get it off the unanswered list]

The file here uses the skull package, which uses a font that is only available in bitmap format. This is embedded, but will not scale: depending on the resolution of the font this may lead to low-resolution output. The only way around this is to change to a different, vector, font.

Joseph Wright
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