Re: Adobe

From: Juliusz Chroboczek (jec@dcs.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 13:37:59 EDT


"Alfinito, Charles" <AlfinitoC@cadmus.com>:

AC> Quick and easy. Does Adobe Acrobat support Unicode?

AC> Example: I write a document in WORD 2000 and use a symbol from the
AC> Unicode font called Mathematical Operators. I then want to
AC> convert it to a pdf file.

Please note that I only use Distiller on Unix platforms, so what
follows might contain inacurracies w.r.t. the Word/Windows platform.
I'll assume you're speaking of a TrueType font file.

You print your document to a PostScript file using a printer driver
that supports downloading Type 42 outlines together with Distiller's
PPD (you might need to hit a dialog somewhere to request downloading
of TrueType fonts as Type 42 outlines, not bitmaps, and not to use
substitutions for the printer's fonts). You then distill this file,
with options to ``embed all fonts'' and ``subset all fonts''. In
theory, the file should contain the *glyph* for the character you
need.

AC> Would this character convert?

The glyph should be properly embedded -- the PDF file will actually
contain the picture to draw for this character. Whether or not the
information that the squiggle in question is a ``proportional to''
sign will be preserved in the PDF file depends on both the font and
the driver; it probably will not.

AC> Would it be viewable in Acrobat Reader 3.0?

It should be viewable. It will most probably not be possible to
select it and paste it into another application.

All the information above should be taken up to bugs (``features'') in
Windows, Word, your printer driver, Distiller, and Reader. For
example, as another contributor noted, it might very well be that your
Unicode-encoded font is so large (either in filesize or in number of
glyphs) that it crashes some of the tools. There's an American idiom
that's relevant, something about varying mileage.

I wish you good luck,

                                        Juliusz Chroboczek



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:53 EDT