[tex-k] dvips font issue with embedded graphics file

[Roderick Johnstone]

On 14/01/12 00:43, Pierre MacKay wrote:
> On 01/13/2012 04:27 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>> On 2012-01-13 at 12:25:16 -0800, Pierre MacKay wrote:
>>
>>   >  On 01/13/2012 03:10 AM, Roderick Johnstone wrote:
>>   >  >  Hi
>>   >  >
>>   >  >  I have an issue with fonts in some graphics files embedded by
>> dvips that
>>   >  >  are not displaying correctly in the postscript written by
>> dvips. The
>>   >  >  issue is fixed using dvips -j0.
>>   >  >
>>   >  >  Not sure if this is a dvips bug or a problem with my graphics
>> file. I
>>   >  >  could provide a simple test case if anyone could help.
>>   >  >
>>   >  >  Thanks
>>   >  >
>>   >  >  Roderick Johnstone
>>   >  >
>>   >  >
>>   >  If the fonts are contained in the graphics file, DVIPS cannot
>> reach in
>>   >  to manage and revise any subsetting done by the graphics program.
>>
>> Does dvips make any attempt to subset fonts in external graphics files
>> at all unless they contain something described in section 5.1.6. of
>> the dvips manual?
>>
>> Regards,
>>    Reinhard
>>
> That was my point, I don't think it can do so or does do so, but the
> phenomenon mentioned by Roderick Johnstone matches the effect of
> conflicting subsets that I have already encountered, particularly when
> using graphics generated by Illustrator.  The confusion may arise in my
> case owing to the use of a distiller such as ps2pdf or Adobe on-line
> distiller.  I wonder whether Roderick Johnstone's problem involves that
> additional stage. In any case, I have learned to avoid using fonts with
> the same foundry name in both included non-TeX graphics and TeX text. 
> For one thing, they never look quite the same, so an explicit change of
> font seems a better idea.
> 
> Pierre MacKay

Hi

Thanks for your attention to this issue. Here are some more details.

I'm using texlive-2011 on Fedora 16 x86_64 from the packages made
available by Jindrich Novy.

I generated a graphics postscript file from a package called pgplot, and
incorporated that into a latex document.

What I find is that when using the "roman" font in pgplot and the latex
"times" package the postscript generated by dvips has some missing
symbols in the axis labels of the graphics, eg superscript minus sign is
missing. If I further process the ps file through ps2pdf the minus sign
is still missing and the spaces between words in the axis labels in the
graphics are lost in the resulting pdf.

As I said in my original post, this can be worked around by using dvips
-j0. The problem seems to be provoked by using a combination of the
latex "times" package and the "roman" pgplot font. Either omitting the
"times" package or changing to a different pgplot font avoids the problem.

Before we updated to Fedora 16 we were using the stock texlive-2007 in
Fedora 14 and we did not see this problem.

Roderick