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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label distill-prob</title>
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<h3>Characters missing from PDF output</h3>
<p/>If you&#8217;re using <i>Acrobat</i> <i>Distiller</i> to create your
PDF output, you may find
characters missing.  This may manifest
itself as messed-up maths equations (missing
&#8220;-&#8221; signs, for example), or bits missing
from large symbols.  Early versions of <i>Distiller</i> used to
ignore character positions 0&#8211;31 and 128&#8211;159 of every font: Adobe&#8217;s
fonts never use such positions, so why should <i>Distiller</i>?
<p/>Well, the answer to this question is &#8220;because Adobe don&#8217;t produce all
the world&#8217;s fonts&#8221; &#8212; fonts like <i>Computer</i>
<i>Modern</i> were around before Adobe came on the scene, and
<em>they</em> use positions 0&#8211;31.  Adobe don&#8217;t react to complaints like
that in the previous sentence, but they do release new versions of
their programs; and <i>Distiller</i>, since at least version 4.0,
<em>has</em> recognised the font positions it used to shun.
<p/>Meanwhile, TeX users with old versions of <i>Distiller</i> need
to deal with their fonts.  <i>Dvips</i> comes to our aid: the
switch <code>-G1</code> (&#8220;remap characters&#8221;), which moves the offending
characters out of the way.  The PDF configuration file
(<code>-Ppdf</code>), recommended 
in &#8220;<a href="FAQ-fuzzy-type3.html">the wrong type of fonts</a>&#8221;,
includes the switch.
<p/>The switch is not without its problems; pre-2003 versions of
<i>dvips</i> will apply it to Adobe fonts as well, causing
<a href="FAQ-charshift.html">havoc</a>, but fortunately
that problem is usually soluble.  However, a document using both
CM and Adobe-specified fonts is stuck.  The only real solution
is either to upgrade <i>dvips</i>, or to spend money to upgrade
<i>Distiller</i>.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=distill-prob">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=distill-prob</a>
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