Acrobat 5 views fine, but substitutes fonts upon printing

bug-ID: ACR5-2001-04-01

Some PDF documents created by some versions of pdf-TEX view correctly on-screen in Acrobat 5.00 and Acrobat Reader 5.00, but Courier is substituted for some of the Computer Modern fonts when the job is printed.

Software Versions

• Acrobat 5.00 and Acrobat Reader 5.00
• all platforms

Reported by:

Tom Kacvinsky, April 2001.

This bug has been known since early 2001, when Acrobat 5 was released. Earlier versions of Acrobat  and Acrobat Reader  did not exhibit such font substitutions. The cause was diagnosed, by Tom Kacvinsky and others, as being due to `gaps' in the Subrs array of the subsetted fonts for which substitution occurs; the CoolType font technology, introduced for version 5 of the Acrobat  software, rejects fonts with these gaps.

Tom K. devised a patch to pdf-TEX so as to avoid this problem, yet many legacy documents remain.

Status: fixed

Adobe fixed the CoolType engine, for Acrobat 5.05 and Acrobat Reader 5.05.

Example

(Click on an image to download the corresponding file.)

created with pdf-TEX	print: (Reader4.05)	print: (Acrobat5.00)	print: (Reader5.05)
Questions.pdf	Questions_405.pdf	Questions_500.pdf	Questions_505.pdf
(size = 80k)	(size = 56k)	(size = 67k)	(size = 53k)

The first file here was created using pdf-TEX. Others come from capturing a (PostScript) print-job into a file, then processing with Acrobat Distiller (version 5.0) on a Macintosh.

Note that the page was rotated by 180^o when printed from Acrobat Reader 4.05a; this is due to an unrelated bug!

Further Information

Versions of pdf-TEX that produce suspect PDF files are: 0.14e, 0.14f .

Suggested Fix/Workaround

Adobe: No further action required.
Users: upgrade to Acrobat 10.0, or later.