Sub Articulo 43.0
Sorry you're having problems with FoilTeX and PDF. I (think I) would
be surprised that the root cause is "the font manipulation done by
FoilTeX" because the essense of this is scaling of standard
fonts. There is nothing really fancy about it, particularly once you
get to dvi. I've never tried using dvips to get to pdf so I can't
say if that's the problem.
On the other hand, I just tried a simple test of
pdflatex sampfoil
(with a modified version of sampfoil.tex, adding pdfoutput=1, e.g.)
and the results were essentially OK. At least AcroRead had no problem
with it.
Have you tried this?