Re: Identity-H encoding in PDFs on Linux?

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear "to be enlightened":

Now "clone" PDF readers, oy ...

Quite frankly, the "problem" is that your colleague's PDF reader
is not fully and properly interpreting the PDF file. "Identity-H"
encoding is double-byte encoding of fonts, often associated more
with use of Far Eastern fonts (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Distiller
uses such encoding for optimization of some text (especially for
symbol/dingbat fonts and international character sets beyond
standard ASCII) and for all text by InDesign when exporting PDF.
More PDF, especially from Unicode-savvy applications, rather than
less will be using such double-byte font encoding going forward.

The only "workaround" is to set the Distiller to create PDF 1.2
(i.e., Acrobat 3)-compatible PDF files via Distiller job options.
Those files will not have such encoding for the cases you cite.
Of course, PDF 1.2 doesn't support gradients and transparency
amongst other features.

A better solution would be for your Linux hackers to use the Linux
version of Acrobat Reader (I know that the "software socialists"
don't like spending money for software, but the Reader is free)
instead of XPDF. Or suggest to whoever created or maintains XPDF
to fix their program.

        - Dov


At 5/9/2003 03:53 PM, Martha J Davidson wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>vital statistics: FM 7p578 (unstructured), Acrobat 5.05, WinXP
>
>I've run into a strange thing. I'm creating PDFs with all my fonts set for embedding (AGaramond, GillSans, Wingdings2) and when a colleague reads the PDF on Linux with XPDF the Wingdings characters don't show up at all and the sans-serif fonts look squished together.
>
>When he opened the PDF in Acrobat Reader 5.05 for Linux, everything showed up. We looked at the embedded fonts and fit said "Identity-H" in the encoding or Wingdings2 and "Windows" for the encoding for the rest of the fonts.
>
>When I searched the Acrobat help for "encoding" and for "Identity," I found nothing that explained what this encoding means or how it is set. I also found nothing informative when I searched the Adobe user-to-user forums.
>
>Can someone explain this to me? Is there a way to set the encoding so that all fonts show up on Linux when people use XPDF instead of Acrobat Reader?
>
>Thanks for any help or enlightenment you can offer me.
>
>martha
>
>
>--
>Martha Jane {Kolman | Davidson}
>Dances With Words
>editrix@nemasys.com


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