when is a PDF not a PDF?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/14/2009 04:05 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 09/14/2009 03:08 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> There's a specific PDF variant (used by people who are fanatical about
>> archival) that embeds *all* fonts: PDF/A-1a.  My version of Openoffice
>> (3.1.1 / Fedora 11) has an option in the "Export as PDF" dialog to save in
>> this format.
>>
>> Alternatively, I'm guessing you can tune the Cups-pdf driver to generate
>> A-1a PDFs.
>>   
> AFAIK, all versions of OpenOffice had export to PDF at least back in the
> 2.0 days. If I recall, some of the early versions of 3.0 had some issues
> with both printing and with PDFs. I would suggest that Rob download the
> latest version (3.1.1) and test the export to PDF from there. I was
> looking at the download table, and most of the Linux variants support
> 3.1.1, except Mac OSX for PPC.  When I was teaching at Northeastern, I
> placed all my presentations online at PDFs produiced by OpenOffice, but
> some times the fonts did not render well.

You missed my point.  I know the general "Export to PDF" is an old feature,
but the option for PDF/A-1a does not go back to the 2.0 days.  (it was an
option added in 2.4.0 as it turns out:
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/01/generating-pdfa-for-long-term-archiving.html)

I don't believe the problem is with Openoffice at all, it's with the font
configuration in the rest of the system and/or the printer's built-in fonts.
 Using the A-1a variant of PDF should allow you to work around the problems.

Matt