Fonts in PDF Files

I’ve written about the trouble of font embedding in PDF Files before. It seems publishers get more and more picky about that, requesting you to create fully self-contained PDFs, i.e. also containing all the standard fonts such as Times or Helvetica.

If you do not have the (expensive) original Postscript versions of these fonts, Adobe Distiller will not embed them in your PDF but leave replacement to the PDF viewer (which then uses an appropriate font available on the system).

To embed them you can use the free versions provided by URW (available e.g. from CTAN). You might need to replace font names in the Postsscript file. If you create LaTeX documents you can configure dvips to do so; in any case you can do a simple search & replace in your PS file (a list of the URW font names is e.g. here). Then you just have to make the .pfb files of the fonts known to Distiller as described in the second part of the previous post.