Has the Mathematica/Adobe Acrobat 5.0 Math1 Font Screwup Been Fixed Yet?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg32779] Has the Mathematica/Adobe Acrobat 5.0 Math1 Font Screwup Been Fixed Yet?
- From: aes <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 05:11:56 -0500 (EST)
- Organization: Stanford University
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Has the software screwup under which Adobe Acrobat 5.0 refuses to print (that is, distill) any documents containing EPS files exported from Mathematica and containing Mathematica's default "Math1" fonts been fixed yet? (I'm not looking for workarounds, which I've already had to implement. I'm asking if Mathematica has either issued a patch adding the necessary legal stuff to its fonts, or Adobe has issued a patch relaxing its legalistic enforcement so that Acrobat 5.0 will now do what all earlier versions of Acrobat used to do? For those not already familiar with the problem, more details below.) ------------------ FONTS, LAWYERS, AND PERSONAL COMPUTER SOFTWARE Something over a year ago I incorporated into a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation a number of Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) plots prepared using Wolfram's Mathematica software. Recently, working against a tight deadline I attempted to print this presentation to a PDF file as I had done in the past, except this time I was using the latest upgrade (5.0) of Adobe Acrobat. The result was an Acrobat error file which said (irrelevant items excised): Math1 font cannot be embedded due to licensing restrictions. Font vendor (WRI ) does not permit this font to be embedded in PDF. Rest of job will be ignored; no PDF file produced. I'm not qualified to sort out the legal tangles here, but it appears that Wolfram actually does allow its "Math1" font to be embedded in PDF files. SInce the Math1 font data as embedded in the EPS files does not contain an explicit release, however, Acrobat 5.0 refuses to print the offending file (although earlier versions of Acrobat would do so). There is a well-documented Mathematica command that one can use to switch to Helvetica (an unrestricted and widely used font) as the default font for graphics. If you replot and re-export all your graphs using Helvetica as the default font, and if the axis values are all positive and you use no special symbols or punctuation in the axis labels, Acrobat 5.0 will create the desired PDF file. As a further refinement in the art of user torment, however, if either axis extends to negative values Mathematica inserts the negative axis labels into the EPS file using Helvetica for the numerals but Math1 for the "-" signs, and that's enough for Acrobat to refuse to create a PDF file Similar results happen if the axis labels contain many common non-alphameric symbols, such as simple parentheses; Mathematic uses Helvetica for the letters, but outputs punctuation and other symbols in Math1 instead of Helvetica.Turning off this (bizarre) default font substitution behavior can only be done using an obscure and essentially undocumented Mathematica flag.