[PLUG] Fonts

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Jun 28 18:59:49 UTC 2007


I can't believe I can't find the answer, but an hour of searching
Ubuntu forums and googling has revealed only out of date information.

Problem: I need to print a PDF file created by a somewhat inept
linguistics professor. He used a couple of old TTFs that contains the
appropriate IPA characters, but not in the standard Unicode slots.
Instead, the fonts come with a "template" which tells you how to type
characters. For example, to type a schwa (hex 1DD, decimal 477) you
type a capital E. He did all this in MS Word and exported to PDF with
Acrobat 4.0. No matter what he does he cannot seem to get Acrobat to
embed the fonts.

The font license allows him to send me a copy of the fonts for printing
purposes, and he did so. I put the fonts into ~/.fonts and they appear
fine in OpenOffice.org and other similar programs. However, Adobe
Reader 7.08 does not see them. In Adobe Reader you can (theoretically)
type Ctrl-Shift-Y and it will tell Reader to use local fonts, but this
does not work.

Next, I tried Evince, Kpdf and Xpdf. They found the fonts and display
them correctly on screen, but print the "capital letters" from the
template. In other words, they are using the locally installed fonts
for screen display, but failing to use locally installed fonts for
printing. In the world of PDF, this is a serious no-no, but I can't
wait for someone to fix the program code. For what it's worth, I think
they are using Ghostscript for print output.

What I want to try next is to install the fonts globally for all users,
instead of just in my ~/.fonts folder. My hope is that doing so will
make Adobe Reader see them. However, I cannot figure out what folder to
put them in to make them globally available to everyone and every
program. Does anyone know what folder I need? And is there anything
else I need to do besides just dropping them into the folder? Does
anyone have any further suggestions? Other PDF viewers? Other ways to
print PDF files?



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