Doc Eng Logo
University of Nottingham CS
Home People Research

Research - Fonts

ReplFont - Adobe Acrobat Plugin

ReplFont is a plugin to Adobe Acrobat which provides similar functionality to FixFont except for PDF documents.

ReplFont substitutes DVIPS-derived bitmap fonts with "wrappered" Type 1/Type 3 hybrid fonts in PDF documents. This greatly improves the appearance of the document in versions of Acrobat prior to version 6. The matching engine is based on the work FixFont checksum technique, which attempts to recognise the fonts by calculating a checksum for each glyph in the embedded typefaces and matching these against a database of known values.

Please note, this plug-in only works with PDFs that have been created using Adobe Distiller, it will NOT work with Ghostscript or ps2pdf created PDFs.

Download — coming soon

FixFont

This release of FixFont has been updated to handle DVI files created by newer versions of DVIPS.

About FixFont

FixFont is a set of utilities for modifying a PostScript file created by Tomas Rokicki's DVIPS program so it can be used with Type 1 outline versions of the Computer Modern fonts. FixFont's "SUBSTITUTE" program extracts bitmapped fonts from a DVIPS PostScript file and replaces the fonts with references to the original fonts or with the actual Type 1 fonts. This creates a portable, resolution-independent PostScript file that can be sent to printers of various resolutions or converted into an Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) file to achieve optimal font quality on any output device. If you embed Type 1 fonts in the PostScript file, consult the license agreement for your font package before distributing the files. Some typeface vendors don't allow you embed complete fonts into a PDF or PostScript file for public distribution; contact your type vendor for more information.

When Not To Use FixFont

These utilities are intended to help create a portable PostScript file from "legacy" PostScript files -- PostScript files for which the original TeX source code or DVI file are not available. If you have the TeX or DVI file simply configure your DVI to PS driver to use Type 1 fonts rather than bitmapped fonts. This is a much more reliable method for
creating a PostScript file with scalable outline fonts than attempting to extract the bitmap fonts after they've been embedded in the PostScript file.

Information on configuring DVIPS to use scalable Type 1 fonts is available from The PDFzone and Adobe Systems.

Download — coming soon