I am using Ghostscript v9.07 on Windows 7 (x64) to convert PostScript files into PDFs. Inside the PostScript files, the fonts Times-Roman and Times-Bold are used - this can be seen in the PostScript plain-text:
/Times-Roman findfont 24.00 scalefont setfont
.
.
.
/Times-Bold findfont 24.00 scalefont setfont
.
.
.
(This is extremely common in PostScript output from TeX.)
When I convert the PostScript to PDF using Ghostscript, Ghostscript uses the Nimbus-Roman font-family.
GPL Ghostscript 9.07 (2013-02-14)
Copyright (C) 2012 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Loading NimbusRomNo9L-Regu font from %rom%Resource/Font/NimbusRomNo9L-Regu... 39
38016 2393624 2695216 1387174 4 done.
Loading NimbusRomNo9L-Medi font from %rom%Resource/Font/NimbusRomNo9L-Medi... 39
38016 2453738 2695216 1390537 4 done.
This output suggests that it is loading the font-family from resources embedded in the executable. In any case, it isn't loading it from the PostScript file so it is either from the application's distribution or the operating system.
The result looks abysmal in every PDF viewer I have tried, regardless of font-smoothing settings.
I cannot understand it. The resulting PDF's text is not rasterised - you can select it and cut and paste it and the file-size alone shows that it is still real text - so I can only conclude that this is a quirk of the Nimbus-Roman typeface.
There is absolutely no reason to use that typeface but, no matter what I do, I cannot seem to get Ghostscript to use a Times-Roman (or equivalent) typeface from the Windows font set.
I tried the -sFONTPATH switch (alternatively called sFONTDIR on some sites - I tried both) to no avail and I went looking for the fontmap file to try hacking that but didn't find one for Windows - only fontmaps for other operating systems in the install directory.
How can I change this behaviour and stop Ghostscript from using the awful font?
The way to have Ghostscript use a specific font, rather than a substitute, is to embed the font in the input.
This:
/Times-Roman findfont 24.00 scalefont setfont
merely requests a font (and size), it does not include the font data. In the absence of the font, Ghostscript is forced to use a substitute font.
On Windows, Ghostscript uses the ROM file system, and does not ship with the support files. If you want to use those you can pull them from Git, and then use the -I switch. That will allow you to alter cidfmap which controls the CIDFonts known to Ghostscript, and fontmap.GS which controls the regular fonts known.
However, I don't see the result you do with the apparently bitmapped font. Perhaps you should try a newer version of Ghostscript. Or post an original PostScript program and converted PDF file so it would be possible to examine them.
[edit starts here]
OK so basically there's some problems with what you've put up above. The screenshot you have there is from page 1, but the 'font substitution', ie the loading of NimbusRoman-Regular and NimbusRoman-Bold (on current versions of Ghostscript) take place on page 5. Clearly the 'substitution' on page 5 can't affect what's on page 1. You would have seen that if you hadn't set -dBATCH, moral; when debugging a problem, keep the command line simple.
The actual 'problem' is that the PostScript program uses a type 3 bitmap font for all the text, the font being defined in the body of the program.
In short, the text is a crappy bitmap font because that's the way the PostScript has been created, it contains a crappy bitmap font and insists on using it (FWIW it appears to have been rendered at 300 dpi).
In fact the only text in the document which is scalable is the very text which uses Times-Roman (not a substitution, it uses the font from the interpreter instead of the bitmap font).
This is the text for the figure at the top of the page; 'point', 'p', 'X', 'line', 'Y', 'u', 'W'. This has been included as an EPS (originally called ray_space.eps) into the document, which is why it uses real scalable fonts. If you zoom in on the top of page 5 you will see that the scalable fonts continue to look smooth (the body of the figure) while the bitmapped font (the figure title for example) look bitmapped.
There's nothing you can do about that, essentially, other than recreate the PostScript from the original DVI document. This is not a bug (or at least, not a Ghostscript bug).
[and another edit...]
I'm afraid its not really simple.
There are 26 fonts named /Fa to /Fx, I am unsure why this is the case, since each font is capable of containing 255 glyphs yet most do not (at the same time, they don't just contain two glyphs either). There seems no good reason for the fonts being encoded as they are.
The program uses each font as it requires it, switching fonts when it needs different glyphs. Eg:
1 0 bop
392 319 a Fx (An)21 b(In)n(tro)r(duction)g(to)h(Pro)t(jectiv)n
(e)h(Geometry)670 410 y(\(for)f(computer)f(vision\))
815
561 y Fw(Stan)c(Birc)o(h\014eld)74 754 y Fv(1)67 b(In)n(tro)r(duction)
74 856 y Fu(W)l(e)
The 'Fx' and 'Fw' calls load the font dictionary which is then used by the following code. Frankly the Tex PostScript is difficult to figure out, one might almost think it was designed to be obfuscated.
Identifying which 2-byte pair beginning with 'F' require removing or replacing, and which do not (eg ASCII encoded image data) would be tricky. In addition the glyphs are rendered flipped in the y axis (to match the transformation matrix in use) so you would have to adjust the FontMatrix similarly for a substitute font.
If the fonts in these TeX font dictionaries always contained the same glyphs, it would be possible to define a set of substitute fonts (/Fa to /Fx) which could be used instead. These would need to be loaded into the TeXDict dictionary to replace the ones defined in the header of the progtam of course.
I'm not saying its impossible, but it would be a good amount of research effort to figure out what would be possible, and then a good amount of coding to implement it.
Related
When I run a PDF which was originally created with LibreOffice on Linux, through ghostscript 9.19 on OSX, to produce another (flattened) PDF, the output is perfect except for one problem. All emdashes in the entire document have been replaced with a standard hyphen (awkwardly followed by half of a space.) Oddly enough, if I highlight the resulting "hyphen+space", my context menu shows that I've selected an emdash, so the underlying text is still an emdash, it is just rendering the wrong glyph.
I can reproduce this on multiple documents from the same source, and I'm assuming there's a setting or switch somewhere that can help resolve this.
I don't know whether the font used makes a difference, but for the sake of reference, the body text of my document is set in Arno Pro. When I use a modern version of LibreOffice on OS X to make a sample document also containing an emdash in Arno Pro, the same problem is not exhibited, so it seems to be specific to the software which originally made these PDF files.
These PDFs are of legacy projects that I am not set-up to re-produce at this time, so I need to prepare them for reprinting using the existing files.
How do I retain emdash glyphs when running a command such as the following?
gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sColorConversionStrategy=/LeaveColorUnchanged \
-dAutoFilterColorImages=true -dAutoFilterGrayImages=true \
-sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
I can add an example of the input PDF to this question if needed.
Without seeing the PDF file it isn't possible to give you an answer. Most likely the font isn't embedded, or if it is embedded doesn't have an emdash glyph.
Copy and paste uses the ToUnicode CMap, so it isn't dependent on the font. Its simply a list of character codes and the Unicode code point associated with each, when using a given font.
Note that this doesn't mean 'the underlying text is still an emdash'. The ToUnicode information is utterly separate from the font end of things, it is effectively metadata and bears no real relation to the font or rendering.
Put the file on DropBox and post the URL and someone can look into it. I'll be on vacation for the next few days though, but maybe someone else will look.
Note that in PDF you don't necessarily specify characters and positions as a list of consecutive characters; you can specify the position of each individually, or you can specify widths which override the width in the font, etc. So there almost certainly is only one glyph, the 'white space' you refer to is probably just that, white space, its not another glyph.
I should also point out (I do this a lot) that Ghostscript never 'flattens', concatenates, merges, or anything similar operation on PDF files. WHen using Ghostscript and the pdfwrite device the original input (in whatever format) is fully interpreted into graphics marking operations, and sent tot eh device. The device executes the marking operations; in the case of a rendering device, it scan-converts and writes to a bitmap. In the case of pdfwrite, it creates PDF operators.
The result of this is that the output PDF file bears no relation to the input PDF, other than its visual appearance.
You also don't say which version of Ghostscript you are using....
I'm trying to use Adobe Normalizer to convert PostScript files to PDF/A.
The problem I am having is that if a font isn't found it is a hard stop. I added the "--ignorestdttfonts=off" and that helps a little bit. Here's what I'm using for my command string:
demonorm -efi --ignorestdttfonts=off -r0 -P ICCProfiles\ -B ".\Settings\PDFA1b 2005 RGB.joboptions" +n -O -O c:\NormalizerOutput InputPsFile.ps
I am using /Times-Roman in my PostScript file, and I have times.ttf as an installed font, but I am getting this error:
%%[ Error: Times-Roman not found. Font cannot be embedded. ]%%
So I have 2 questions:
Given a TTF file, how do I know exactly what font name to use for
Adobe Normalizer?
How do I substitute a font when a font is not found? The default is
to use Courier, but that doesn't seem to be happening. I explicitly
added "--allowdefaultfont=on --defaultfont=Courier" but it had no
effect.
Adobe Normalizer will always look for the PostScript font name. Unfortunately unlike other Adobe products it will not create a fontlist (.lst) file where you can easily see the "FontName" and the location of the font file on your system. So you will have to find other ways to get the exact PostScript font name.
An easy way to see PostScript font names is to open the Distiller settings file (joboptions) using Distiller. You want to use Distiller because you want this to open in a GUI. On the left side panel select "Fonts" and under Embedding > Font Source > select C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ (assuming the TTF file is installed here). The window below will list all the fonts in the C:\Windows\Fonts location. The fonts are listed by their PostScript font names. Note that PostScript font names do not appear with spaces. Look for the Times or Times Roman font that you have installed.
This does get quite tricky with Times or Times-Roman. Is your PostScript file (input file) referring to an Type1 or TrueType font?
In the Normalizer documentation (p174) the Times or Times New Roman family appears as:
Times
Times-Bold
Times-BoldItalic
Times-Italic
Times-Roman
Times New Roman
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
TimesNewRomanPSMT
Note that Times and Times New Roman are not the same fonts. Times is a Type1 font and if you do not have this font installed on your system then Normalizer is correct in its error "Times-Roman not found. Font cannot be embedded."
Hope this information helps.
Adobe Normalizer, as I understand it (I don't have a copy) is essentially a server version of Acrobat Distiller. It accepts PostScript as an input and delivers PDF files.
So there are several possibilities:
1) Normalizer cannot use TrueType fonts installed on the server. From your description that doesn't seem to be the case, as you say that --ignorestdttfonts 'helps a little bit' (it might be useful to know what improves...)
2) Because the missing font is Times-Roman, its simply not embedding the font because it doesn't need to. The 'base 14' fonts are assumed to be included with any PDF consumer, and they don't need to be included. To be honest, this seems like the most likely, as I would have thought that Adobe would ship the base 14 fonts with the Normalizer.
3) The TrueType font isn't available to Normalizer. You haven't said how you installed times.ttf. Did you just install it on the OS (and what OS are you using anyway ?) or did you add it to Normalizer in some fashion ?
4) You may (as you think) have the font name incorrect. The problem is that you cannot use TrueType fonts directly in PostScript. In order to be used in a PostScript program they have to be converted into type 42 fonts. It may be that Normalizer simply can't do that. Do you have any reason to think it can ? If it can, then it may require a TrueType POST table, which is optional and may not be present in your font. However, the font name would be the same as the TrueType font name. The times.ttf I have is called "Times New Roman" and is in fact an OpenType font. If you want to use a font name with spaces you will have to make a string and convert to name :
(Times New Roman) cvn findfont
If you want to check the operation of the default font, I would suggest using a font name which is not one of the base 14, eg:
%!PS
/NoSuchFont findfont 20 scalefont setfont
10 10 moveto
(Hello World) show
showpage
Run that through Normalizer and see what comes out as the font. It may well be that it simply leaves the font request in place of course.
Finally; since this is a commercial product I assume you are entitled to support, wouldn't it be simpler just to ask Adobe ?
I have a PDF which renders fine in Acrobat but fails to print during the PDF to PS conversion process on our printer's RIP. After uncompressing with pdftk and editing I've found if I replace the usage of a certain font it will print.
The font is a strange one, a TrueType subset with a single character (space).
If I pass the PDF through Ghostscript it reports no errors, however an Acrobat pre-flight check will report a missing glyph for space. This error is not reported for the original file. I'm just using a basic command: gswin32c -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o gs.pdf original_sample.pdf
I've pulled out the font data from the original PDF and saved it. Running TTFDUMP.exe produces an interesting result where it seems that the 'glyf' table is missing:
4. 'glyf' - chksm = 0x00000000, off = 0x00000979, len = 0
5. 'head' - chksm = 0xE463EA67, off = 0x00000979, len = 54
Just wondering, am I interpreting this result correctly? Is it valid to run TTFDUMP like this on extracted data from a PDF? I think a 'glyf' table is required based on the spec, at least for the first 4 necessary characters.
TTFDUMP run on the ghostscript PDF produces a similar result but with a 1-byte 'glyf' table.
If so it seems that Acrobat doesn't particularly care about the missing space while other programs (including the printer) do. It's odd it isn't reported as missing though until it runs through Ghostscript.
The PDF is created by Adobe InDesign and the font is copyrighted like most so I can't share it.
Edit - I've accepted Ken's answer as he helped me on the Ghostscript bug tracker. In summary, it seems the font is broken as suspected due to the missing glyf table. Until I hear otherwise I'll have to suppose this is a bug in InDesign, and will continue investigating.
Yes you can run ttfdump on an embedded subset font, its still a perfectly valid font.
A missing glyph is not specifically a problem, because the .notdef glyph is used instead, a missing .notdef means a font isn't legal.
I think you are mistaken about the legality of sharing the PDF file (from the point of view of font embedding). Practically every PDF file you see will contain copyright fonts, but these are permitted to be embedded and distributed as part of a PDF (or indeed PostScript) file. TrueType fonts contain flags which control the DRM of the font, and which can deny embedding in in PDF (or other formats). Ghostscript honours these embedding flags in the font as does Acrobat Distiller and other Adobe products.
There were some fonts which inadvertently shipped with DRM which prevented embedding, and there's a list somewhere of these, along with an explicit statement from the font foundry that its permissible to embed these fonts. I think this was somewhere on the Adobe web site a few years back.
So if you have a PDF file with the font embedded in it (especially if it was produced by an Adobe application) then I would be comfortable that its legal to share.
I'm having some trouble figuring out what the problem actually is, and how you are using Ghostscript. If you are running the PDF->PS and then back to PDF then all bets are off frankly. Round-tripping files will often provoke problems.
In any event I'm happy to look at the file but you will have to make it available.
I'm trying to convert PDFs to PCL (using ghostscript, but I'd love to hear alternative suggestions), and every driver (ghostscript device), including all of the built-ins and gutenprint generate PCL files many times larger than the input PDF. (This is the problem - I need my PCL to be about as small as the input).
Given that the text doesn't show up in the PCL file, I guess that Ghostscript is rasterizing the text. Is there a way to prevent GS generally, or just gutenprint, from doing that? I'd rather either have it embed the fonts, or not even embed the fonts (leave it to the printer to render the fonts)?
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any documentation on this point.
There are 3 (I think) types of font in PCL. There are rendered bitmaps, TrueType fonts (in later versions) and the HPGL stick font.
PDF and PostScript Have type 1, 2 (CFF), 3 and 42 (TrueType, but not the same as PCL) and CIDFonts based on any of the preceding types.
The only font type the two have in common is TrueType, so in order to retain text, any font which was not TrueType would have top be converted into TrueType. This is not a simple task. So Ghostscript simply renders the text, which is guaranteed to work.
PDF is, in general, a much richer format than PCL< there are many PDF constructs (fonts, shading, stroke/fill in a single operation, transparency) which cannot be represented in PCL. So its entirely possible that the increase in size is nothing to do with text and fonts.
In fact, I believe that the PXL drivers in Ghostscript simply render the entire page to a bitmap at the required resolution, and then wrap that up with enough PCL to be successfully sent to a printer. (I could be mistaken on this point though)
Basically, you are not going to get PCL of a similar size to your PDF out of Ghostscript.
Here is a way to 'prevent Ghostscript from rasterizing text'. But its output will be PostScript. You may however succeed convert this PostScript to a PCL5e in an additional step.
The method will convert all glyphs into outline shapes for its PostScript output, and it does not work for its PDF or PCL output. The key here is the -dNOCACHE parameter:
gs -o somepdf.ps -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE=pswrite somepdf.pdf
Of course, converting font glyphs to outlines will take more space than keeping the original fonts embedded, because "fonts" are a space-optimized concept to store, retrieve and render glyph shapes.
Once you have this PostScript, you may be able to convert it to PCL5e with the help of either of the methods you tried before for PDF input (including {Apache?} FOP).
However, I have no idea if the output will be much smaller than versions with rasterized fonts (or even wholesome rasterized pages). But it may be worth a test.
Now vote down this answer too...
Update
Apparently, from version 9.15 (to be released during September/October 2014), Ghostscript will support a new command line parameter:
-dNoOutputFonts
which will cause the output devices pdfwrite, ps2write and eps2write to "to 'flatten' glyphs into 'basic' marking operations (rather than writing fonts to the output)".
That means that the above command should be replaced by this:
gs -o somepdf.ps -dNoOutputFonts -sDEVICE=ps2write somepdf.pdf
Caveats: I've tested this with a few input files using a self-compiled Ghostscript based on current Git sources. It worked flawlessly in each case.
I have a PDF with Type 3 font embedded. How can I convert this Type 3 font to Type 1 font?
It's been many years since this was asked, but I'm posting for anyone else that ran into this problem (like me). The best solution is to regenerate the PDF with settings to avoid type 3 fonts. For example, if you make your figures with matplotlib, then you can follow the instructions here: http://phyletica.org/matplotlib-fonts/
If it is not possible to regenerate the PDF or would require too much time, I also found that the using convert (found in imagemagick) can help. As others have stated, you may lose information, but this will work in most cases: convert example.pdf example.pdf
You may not be able to; Type 3 fonts can contain any PostScript; Type 1 fonts can only contain a restricted subset.
Other answers suggest re-generating from source files to output Type 1 instead of Type 3 fonts. This is probably the best solution when feasible, but there are situations where it may be impossible (eg. if the source files or generation program are unavailable for any reason). Allow me to offer an alternate approach..
How to "convert away" Type 3 fonts
I was able to "convert away" the Type 3 fonts in a PDF figure by opening the file in Adobe Acrobat Pro, and then printing the file to Adobe PDF (a virtual printer provided by Adobe Distiller, part of the Professional suite). I'm using the Adobe Pro suite version 11 (ca 2012), but newer versions presumably can do the same. This action sounds circular, but what it actually does is gives you the opportunity to force rendering of fonts into a new PDF.
The default output settings in my version were sufficient to generate a PDF that was visually indistinguishable from the source PDF, but where all the Type 3 fonts were rendered directly as vector graphics (ie the output PDF contains NO font usage of any kind). The Acrobat print dialog (at least in my Windows version) also has both "Properties" and "Advanced" buttons where one can make all sorts of highly detailed adjustments to the output. These include things like the list of Type 1 fonts to embed (and the settings for partial embedding), output compatibility (I used Acrobat 6 / PDF 1.5), optional image downsampling, etc.
Note this procedure will probably result in a significantly larger PDF output file. In my case the offending text using Type 3 fonts was just a few dozen labels on a quarter-page figure, and the PDF file size grew by about 2x during this conversion; however the absolute size remained under 50kB, so the expansion did not matter for my purposes. For a larger document or one with more text using Type 3 fonts, the expansion might be more pronounced, so YMMV.