Saturday, September 18, 2010

Embedding fonts on Mac (or, another reason why I love my MacBook)

I just learned something remarkable, and I have to write it down so I don't forget:

Often IEEE conferences will require you to submit a PDF with embedded fonts. If you're forced to do this, no doubt you're familiar with a hugely irritating fact about most LaTeX packages: they don't embed fonts by default. There are workarounds, like the ps2pdf command line parameters that force font embedding, but using them can be awkward (e.g., if your LaTeX target isn't postscript, or if you're using a GUI LaTeX editor).

But if you're a Mac user, like me, here's all you have to do: Open the PDF in Preview, and then save it again. It's saved with fonts embedded. That's it, seriously!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

You just saved me hour of frustration... It really works!

Thasnks

Aurelio said...

Thank you!
It works!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the great tip -- but how do you know if it worked or not?

Thanks!

Andrew Eckford said...

Well, when I submit a paper e.g. to EDAS and it complains that fonts aren't embedded, I try this trick and the complaints stop. There must be a way to check explicitly whether fonts are embedded, but I'm not sure how.

Jill Cathey said...

THANK YOU!!!! This has been driving me crazy!

Unknown said...

Cool. You can check it using Adobe Reader.

Anonymous said...

It really works well! thank you!

Sebastián said...

Awesome!
Spent hours trying to do if from latex and it was so simple!

command+s was the key!

Thanks again!