Re: [ft] Issues with fonts embedded in PDF

[Jeremias Maerki]

Thanks a lot for looking into this! Based on this information I was able
to fix a bug in Apache FOP where the TrueType subsetting code would set 
numTables
one too high if there was no "fpgm" table in the font. At least
FreeSerif & Co. now work when viewed in GhostScript. I'll do some more
testing later now that I know what to look for. Thanks!

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=616080&view=rev

On 28.01.2008 20:18:45 Derek B. Noonburg wrote:
> On 28 Jan, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > 
> >> Our test file
> >> (http://www.intelsig.be/~piater/nobackup/fop/fop-trunk.pdf) contains
> >> eight embedded TrueType fonts, and is displayed correctly by
> >> Acroread. However, four of these fonts (FreeSerif, latex-xft cmr10,
> >> LinuxLibertine, STIXGeneral converted from OTF using fontforge) just
> >> leave blanks when viewed by xpdf, gv, kpdf, or evince (but
> >> copy&paste ok); the other four are rendered ok (BitstreamVeraSerif,
> >> DejaVuSerif, LiberationSerif, GentiumBasic).
> > 
> > xpdf reports `cid2' loading failures, whatever this is.  Note that
> > xpdf and friends all use the xpdf library, AFAIK.
> > 
> >> Since all of these four viewers use FreeType, it looks like it might
> >> be a FreeType issue; on the other hand, all of these fonts are
> >> displayed correctly by ftview. Or perhaps it is an embedding (Fop)
> >> issue, but acroread has no trouble.
> > 
> > I suspect a problem with CID handling.
> 
> The TrueType fonts in question have broken table directories.  In
> particular:
> 
> * the numTables entry is incorrect (one too high)
> * the last entry in the table directory has a valid tag, but the rest of
>   the entry is all zeros
> * I believe searchRange entry is also wrong (but I'm not sure that
>   anyone uses this anymore, so it may not be relevant)
> 
> (That's for the embedded copy of FreeSerif -- I didn't look at the
> others.)
> 
> I had another report of this problem a month or two ago.  It seems to be
> a bug in FontForge.  In that case, someone was converting metafont fonts
> to TrueType, using mftrace, which uses FontForge.
> 
> If you've already tried the latest version of FontForge, I would suggest
> reporting the bug to them.  Please feel free to forward this message,
> and they're welcome to contact me if they have questions on the info
> above.
> 
> - Derek



Jeremias Maerki