4 ms·

> Good to see PDF viewers will at least keep supporting it. No, the reason PDFs created with these fonts will remain viewable is the same reason printed docume

by wolrah 4y ago

> Good to see PDF viewers will at least keep supporting it. No, the reason PDFs created with these fonts will remain viewable is the same reason printed documents will remain readable. The glyphs used are part of the document. You don't need to have the font installed or even have the ability to render fonts to display a PDF, that's the whole point (*Portable* Document Format). You may have noticed that some PDFs, especially older ones, either don't allow text to be selected or have weird behavior when selecting where the selection might go in a line across columns instead of following the text. This is because they don't include the metadata required to explain the document as text, it's just a bunch of glyphs.

gpvos 4y ago
Well, they are embedded in the PDF as a Type 1 font. That support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font rendering depends on a library shared with other software that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO standard). Reasons for text selection going across columns can be very varied, although indeed documents with metadata will also otherwise usually be structured enough to have proper text order.
- wolrah 4y ago
  > Well, they are embedded in the PDF as a Type 1 font. That support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font rendering depends on a library shared with other software that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO standard). Type 1 fonts are a subset of Postscript sufficient to describe glyph outlines, plus hinting and font specific metadata. PDFs are a larger subset of Postscript that keeps more features but still strips it down from a programming language to a document description language while adding a stricter structure, embedding of files, and other features relevant to its use as digital paper. The Venn diagram of PostScript, PDF, and Type 1 fonts has a LOT of overlap. Any useful Postscript or PDF viewer inherently has to support everything about Type 1 fonts other than hinting, and hinting only matters at sizes where subpixels matter.

by wolrah 4y ago

gpvos 4y ago

Well, they are embedded in the PDF as a Type 1 font. That support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font rendering depends on a library shared with other software that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO standard). Reasons for text selection going across columns can be very varied, although indeed documents with metadata will also otherwise usually be structured enough to have proper text order.

wolrah 4y ago
> Well, they are embedded in the PDF as a Type 1 font. That support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font rendering depends on a library shared with other software that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO standard). Type 1 fonts are a subset of Postscript sufficient to describe glyph outlines, plus hinting and font specific metadata. PDFs are a larger subset of Postscript that keeps more features but still strips it down from a programming language to a document description language while adding a stricter structure, embedding of files, and other features relevant to its use as digital paper. The Venn diagram of PostScript, PDF, and Type 1 fonts has a LOT of overlap. Any useful Postscript or PDF viewer inherently has to support everything about Type 1 fonts other than hinting, and hinting only matters at sizes where subpixels matter.