[OS X TeX] mysterious pdf produced by ghostscript

Joachim Kock kock at math.uqam.ca
Fri Aug 20 13:48:47 EDT 2004


Dear list readers,

I hope somebody can help with this font problem --- I could not find an
answer in the archives.

I have a couple of old ps files (originally exported from a Dynatext
version of Encyclopedia of Mathematics, many years ago).  Last year they
worked as expected in TexShop as well as in Preview.  But ever since I 
upgraded to Panther (and installed a new tetex via i-installer) there 
are mysterious problems.

The ps file displays fine in gv

The file is also correctly translated into pdf using pstopdf.  (For example
Preview converts the file and displays it correctly, and TeXShop also
handles the file well if set to use Panther distiller instead of
ghostscript.)

The problems start when converting the file to pdf using ghostscript: in
many cases greek letters and symbols become an outlined rectangle instead.

The pdf file generated by ghostscript (for example from TeXShop) does not
display properly neither in TeXShop nor in Preview, but displays those 
outlined rectangles instead.

When the pdf file is sent through texexec --pdfselect there are tons of
warnings about missing fonts, e.g.

  Warning: pdfetex (file /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/fonts/type1/bluesky/c
  m/cmmi10.pfb): glyph `Aacute' undefined

On the other hand, the pdf file generated by ghostscript does display
correctly in Acrobat!

I notice that the file generated by pstopdf is almost twice as
big as the one made with gs.  So I guess it is a problem with font
embedding.  But assuming that pstopdf embeds fonts more consciously
than gs, why can't texexec find those fonts?  And howcome Acrobat
can find them?

And as I said, last year, with Jaguar, I didn't have any of these
problems.

I would be very grateful if anyone can throw a little light on this,
and maybe even propose a solution.

Thanks in advance.
Joachim.

PS: If anybody wants to have a look at the ps file, I have uploaded it to
http://www.cirget.uqam.ca/~kock/yamabe.ps.gz

PPS: My ghostscript is AFPL Ghostscript 8.13 (2003-12-31), and my gs
command is

  gs "-dCompatibilityLevel=1.3" -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
      "-sOutputFile=yamabe.pdf" -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 \
      -c .setpdfwrite -f yamabe.ps
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