David Wooten wrote:

Greetings all,

A sad story: My context-typeset dissertation was printed/distributed by a POD publisher with aweful typographical errors (like all commas in the main font being replaced by an ff ligature). Obviously the printer didn't check their results. The file /reads/ fine both for me and the publisher, but the printer let us know that the file is unprintable due to problems with fonts not being embedded (why they originally printed an "unprintable" file I'll never know).

Now as far as I can tell, fonts /are /embedded. It was made with context MKII, using hz and hanging punctuation, etc. When I look at the document in Adobe Acrobat, and check the document/font details, it gives a list of embedded fonts only.

I'm not certain that the printer is in the right, but how can I tell? Is it possible that the pdf was altered when transferred from me to the publisher then to the printer? That compression of the pdf (zip) had any impact? Any other possibilities? What do you need to know to offer advice? ---I can send the file or a part of it if it is needed.

Hi David, if the printer didn't alter the file and the fonts were embedded in the original PDF document, they didn't vanished. The zip compression doesn't alter those things (AFAIK). A way to check whether the fonts are embedded or not, you can download ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl2-dos6.zip (if you are using Windows) and run from the command-line pdffonts dissertation-filename.pdf Replace dissertation-filename.pdf with the actual file name and pdffonts will display all font information. If this is too complicated for you, send me the original file in a private reply and I will post the results. I hope it helps, Pablo

Hello David, the only thing that I can tell you: a few days/weeks ago I have noticed that Adobe Acrobat destroys encodings of documents made by ConTeXt when I compress the document (in order to reduce size, I tried to downsample and compress graphics). My first impression as that this happens because I include some PDF figures that possibly include the same font, and Acrobat tries to compress the document by using the same encoding for all fonts. So I get weird characters in place of ligatures and accented letters. The problem is not easily reproducible when trying to make a minimal example. (I did not manage to do that yet.) This is still on the short-term waiting list for me to figure out which figure causes problems, though it probably won't help me much, as it's almost definitely a bug in Acrobat. The only thing I could do is send the file with minimal example to Adobe and then wait for ages to resolve that bug (or try to use some other version on another operating system). I could easily imagine that the same kind of problem happens in print shop, where software isn't capable of fully interpreting the PDF you are sending there. The same weird kind of problem also happend to my colleague when he prepared slides in beamer (when 99% do it in Powerpoint, even though all the slides are full of equations), and then symbols in equations were completely screwed up (he didn't have his own laptop, and took it from University) in Adobe reader. Absolutely no idea why this has happened. I could suggest you to remove images and ask the printshop to try to print without images, but you cannot easily experiment with their printer. Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to try to print somewhere else. If there are bugs in software that doesn't depend on you, there's not much that you could do. LaTeX would most probably cause you the same problem when using the same font. Mojca On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 6:12 PM, David Wooten wrote:

Greetings all, A sad story: My context-typeset dissertation was printed/distributed by a POD publisher with aweful typographical errors (like all commas in the main font being replaced by an ff ligature). Obviously the printer didn't check their results. The file reads fine both for me and the publisher, but the printer let us know that the file is unprintable due to problems with fonts not being embedded (why they originally printed an "unprintable" file I'll never know). Now as far as I can tell, fonts are embedded. It was made with context MKII, using hz and hanging punctuation, etc. When I look at the document in Adobe Acrobat, and check the document/font details, it gives a list of embedded fonts only. I'm not certain that the printer is in the right, but how can I tell? Is it possible that the pdf was altered when transferred from me to the publisher then to the printer? That compression of the pdf (zip) had any impact? Any other possibilities? What do you need to know to offer advice? ---I can send the file or a part of it if it is needed. Best, David