[Fedora-i18n-list] ps2pdf and Japanese fonts

[Michael Koch]

Hi,

I am experimenting with generating PDF files from PS which contain Japanese
fonts using ps2pdf in Fedora Core 1. In the default setup, the resulting PDF
file displays the Japanese characters, but the glyphs are embedded in the
PDF file as bitmaps. This seems to be because VFLib is used for integrating
Japanese TrueType fonts in Ghostscript, and it generates a font format for
which ps2pdf does not support font outline embedding.

An alternative I tried is using the CIDFnmap mechanism for integrating asian
fonts in Ghostscript. It seems that the Fedora setup is already prepared for
this, all I had to do was comment out the VFlib font entries in
vflib/kconfig.ps and edit CIDFnmap so that the font configuration files for
Japanese are included. With this setup, the glyphs are embedded in the PDF
document as outlines, but unfortunately only if I use ps2pdf13. It seems
that for older PDF versions, ps2pdf does not support font embedding for the
generated font type and outputs a PDF document which contains garbled
characters.

What I would like to ask the list is if there are other configuration
alternatives for font embedding in ps2pdf, and also if in future Fedora
releases asian TrueType font integration should be done with the CIDFnmap
mechanism instead of VFlib.

Note that I have only tested with the Ghostscript demo ps file gscjk_aj.ps
and PS files generated from Mozilla. I have not tested PS documents with
characters from other asian languages.

Michael