[XeTeX] 0.997 font oddity

[Jonathan Kew]

On 27 Jul 2007, at 2:16 pm, Stephen Moye wrote:

>
> On Friday, July 27, 2007, at 07:34AM, "Jonathan Kew"  
> <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
>> TrueType and OpenType fonts contain flags that are supposed to
>> indicate any license restrictions on embedding the fonts in
>> documents, and xdvipdfmx informs you of such restrictions. But this
>> particular message doesn't really seem very useful; it's not like you
>> can do much with the PDF except Preview and Print anyway, usually!
>
> Well, no, I could send it to someone who is not on a Mac and should  
> view or print
> the file

Sorry, "you" there was meant to refer to anyone who gets the PDF, not  
just you the originator.

> -- not possible if the fonts are not embedded, which, I think, is  
> what the
> message is getting at (?).

The fonts *are* embedded; the message is simply notifying you that  
there may be licensing restrictions on how that document is used, due  
to one of the fonts present.

> I guess I am also surprised to learn that Apple would ship OS X fonts
> that could not be embedded.

It's pretty common for fonts to have the "preview & print" permission  
setting, not "editable embedding". And some have "no embedding", in  
which case xdvipdfmx issues a "warning" rather than merely a  
"notice" (but still embeds the font, provided you give the -E option).

AFAICT, the Quartz PDF generation path always embeds all the fonts  
*regardless* of the setting of the embedding flags. I guess a  
justification for this would be that in the Quartz graphics world,  
PDF is simply being used as a print stream to describe the pages to a  
printer (or screen), and we just happen to capture that stream as a  
persistent file. And arguably the situation is similar in the TeX world.

I think it's also quite common for the no-embedding flags to be set  
even when the font developer/vendor does not really wish to impose  
any restrictions -- one reason for this is that some font creation  
tools set the flags to "no embedding" by default, and many font  
designers were unaware of this.

> But then, if I  comment out all the system fonts used by fontspec
> and still get the message, what does that mean -- that the default  
> fonts
> have the flag set?

Yes, the Latin Modern fonts in TeX Live appear to have "Preview &  
Print only" embedding flags.

> I guess I'd like to see the message give an indication of which
> font(s) trigger it.

Yes, I agree that would be helpful.

JK