[PLUG] missing characters in PDF

[Alan Olsen]

On 12/18/06, TedK <tkubaska at charter.net> wrote:
>
> I downloaded a PDF to read and mostly it's fine. But it is missing some
> characters, replacing them with blanks. These characters are probably
> special characters (Greek symbols in equations).
>
> My question is, Is this my problem or the PDF's. Do I not have some fonts
> installed or configured on my system? Or is it a problem with the way the
> PDF was made? Thanks.


Sounds like the fonts were not embedded in the pdf.

Many fonts have the "no embed" flag set to prevent them from being included
in documents.  (It is an "anti-copying scheme" by the font manufacturers.
It is pretty easy to bypass if you know which bits to twiddle.)

If the pdf does not have the font available, it will try and guess.  Not all
fonts have all of the proper characters.  (The usual example of this is the
weird upper ascii character that MS-Word uses for an apostrophe.)

If you can find the original font name, you can try to get a copy of it.
Linux will handle TrueType fonts just fine.