Missing fonts with PRS-505

[Glenn Ammons]

I bought a Sony Reader PRS-505 yesterday and love it. The PDF support is good and looks better than the conversion tools I've tried (pdfread.py and pdflrf from libprs500). However, some fonts don't show up. This pdf is a good example:

http://www.issco.unige.ch/staff/clark/conll01-final.pdf

The math in this paper is in an italic font which is not reproduced by the Reader. You can see this in the very first page, in the last sentence, where "k" and "k^2" are not reproduced.

Does anyone know how to troubleshoot this? According to pdffonts, the document uses these fonts:

name                                 type         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no      11  0
Courier                              Type 1       no  no  no       8  0
Times-Roman                          Type 1       no  no  no       7  0
Times-Bold                           Type 1       no  no  no       6  0
Times-Italic                         Type 1       no  no  no      22  0

Thanks.
--glenn
West Chester, PA

[JSWolf]

Here's a pdflrf conversion.

[Glenn Ammons]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Here's a pdflrf conversion.

Thanks, that's better than anything I've been able to produce. I still prefer the Reader's native PDF displayer (except for the missing fonts) but the pdflrf output is a lot more readable than pdfread.py and pdf2lrf from libprs500.

I still wonder if there's some way to get the Reader to display all the fonts in this document.

Thanks.
--glenn

[kovidgoyal]

Embed the fonts in the PDF.

[Glenn Ammons]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Embed the fonts in the PDF.

How do I do this? I Googled and found instructions here:

http://colinm.org/tips/latex

Following those, I get a PDF with embedded fonts. At least, pdffonts says this:

name                                 type         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
WPDMKX+Times-Roman                   Type 1C      yes yes no      11  0
QTUMPV+Courier                       Type 1C      yes yes no      13  0
IQOCZL+Helvetica                     Type 1C      yes yes no      20  0
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no      14  0
ZBIXNA+Times-Bold                    Type 1C      yes yes no       9  0
ZJEHRX+Times-Italic                  Type 1C      yes yes no      33  0
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no      26  0
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no      55  0
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no     162  0
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no     208  0
[none]                               Type 3       yes no  no     259  0

The document still looks OK in Evince, but when I load it into the Reader, the math is still gone. Perhaps the problem is not that the Reader can't find certain fonts but that it's not rendering certain fonts correctly?

Thanks.
--glenn
West Chester, PA

[akiburis]

The problem is probably that the font in question is a type 3 font. I believe type 3 fonts are now generally "deprecated," not commonly used and not supported by many applications. I'd guess that the Sony's PDF reader just doesn't support them.

[RWood]

The math parts of the PDF are in the Type3 font and the document is set to substitute local fonts (i.e.: fonts on your machine) for what is in its font declarations. The problem is that the Bitstream fonts on the Reader do not have that glyph defined in the font that is substituted for the Type3 font. When you embedded fonts to read the document on the Reader you can only embed Type1 and TrueType fonts that have information that Adobe Distiller (or its equiv) can read. In all cases it will not touch a Type3 font.

That said, you can perhaps convert the document to text and recreate a Reader sized PDF using embedded Type1 or TrueType fonts. I've done it on other documents and it can be done. Good luck.