[cairo] Font issues in PS and PDF

AngryZealot angryzealot at gmail.com
Sun Nov 23 08:16:53 PST 2008


My project requires PS or PDF output that can be edited in Adobe
Illustrator. If one opens the stock PS or PDF output into Illustrator, the
fonts are either outlined or turned into gibberish. Even if the font is set
to what it originally was rendered with, the glyphs do not have their
appropriate identities.

One workaround I have found is to output the file as PS, then use Acrobat
Distiller to convert it to a PDF. The PDF text comes in as the wrong font,
but the glyph identities are intact and can be set to their correct fonts.
This is, of course, not very ideal. (I should be clear that the files render
just fine in Acrobat or other PDF viewers. It's only editing that is the
problem.)

A quick look at the ps backend makes me think the issue is with font
subsetting. The fonts are saved with the name "f-%d-%d" (so the first font
comes in with the name f-0-0). Illustrator naturally can't find a system
font f-0-0, so it converts everything to outlines. If I manually edit the
postscript file by replacing f-0-0 with the appropriate font name,
everything works beautifully, and Illustrator handles the text just fine. (I
have not tried a similar appropach with PDFs.)

I am using the binaries from the GTK+ project (cairo 1.8.0, pango 1.22.2 for
text). Is there a way to disable this subsetting behavior in cairo? I have
not found a simple flag to toggle, and I'm not familiar with the code base
to strip it out myself. If anyone could guide me in the right direction, I
would be very grateful.

Thanks!
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