Embed Fonts in a PDF on MacOS X from pdftex
November 24th, 2007 by admin
So, I spent a lot of time googling on this. I had a pdf of my thesis I wanted to get printed into book form – and the site I was using to publish needed all the used fonts embedded in the PDF file. It claimed that one was not, in fact, embedded. I use TexShop and pdftex and I have to use pdftex at this point because all my figures were PDFS.
So, I searched for “pdftex embed fonts” or “texshop latex embed fonts” and countless variations. I found a lot of interesting links.
But none worked – the options in udmap.cfg or whatever were already set to embed fonts, but the one Times-Roman just wouldn’t embed. I was looking for some other option to flip and not finding anything when one of these links inspired me to try this:
Open the PDF in OS X Preview. Save as PDF. Boom. Done. The font became embedded. I don’t know if this would work for any PDF but it worked for me. I was then able to upload it with success. (I’m using lulu.com, incidentally. UMI-ordered thesis reprints are a scam. Overpriced and poor quality.)
Update Eh, so that didn’t really work. Lulu didn’t reject the PDF outright but was yet unable to print it as they said in an email later. So, I’m back to the drawing board somewhat. It seems to create embedded fonts but “embedded subsets” which may be a problem. I tried saving to postscript and letting Lulu do the PDF conversion, but the new PDF still has subsets rather than entire fonts. I’ll see if it works.
Tags: fonts, latex, PDF, pdftex — .
jfreeh Says
Did you have any luck with postscript try on Lulu? I am having the same problem…
Aug 5th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Marcos Says
I think eventually I sent them a postscript file which they converted to PDF – honestly, I’m sorry, it’s been so long that I can’t remember what on earth I did – but eventually I did something that worked. :-/
Aug 25th, 2008 at 1:38 pm