Adobe Reader: Jagged or Aliased Text Rendering

Problem

You keep opening PDF documents all through the day using Adobe Reader. But, somewhere during that time you notice that the text in certain PDF documents has started to be rendered in  jagged or aliased fonts.

Solution

Adobe Reader changes its text rendering setting by itself on certain kinds of PDF documents. To set it back to render text smoothly with anti-aliasing: Go to Edit → Preferences and drill down to Page Display → Rendering → Smooth Text. The setting for this would be None. Change it to For Laptops/LCD screens.

Tried with: Adobe Reader 9.3.3

Windows 7: Fixedsys as Console Font

It does not seem to be possible to set Fixedsys as the Console font for the Windows 7 command prompt. Setting it in the Registry silently fails and it does not appear in the Fonts list of the console. This might be due to several reasons:

• Fixedsys is the oldest Windows font. It might not support all the current criteria of a console font.
• Fixedsys is a progenitor of the font Lucida Console, which already appears as an option in the console.
• Fixedsys is a raster font (also called bitmap font) and the only raster fonts supported for the Windows Console are already listed in the Console.
• There is no font file named fixedsys.*. Fixedsys is a font name mapped to several old raster fonts with the name pattern *fix*.fon found in the C:\Windows\Fonts directory. These fonts are aimed at different old terminals like VGA, CVGA and others. On Windows 7, these fonts are:
  

  8514fix.fon
  8514fixe.fon
  8514fixg.fon
  8514fixr.fon
  8514fixt.fon
  c8514fix.fon
  cvgafix.fon
  h8514fix.fon
  hvgafix.fon
  j8514fix.fon
  jvgafix.fon
  s8514fix.fon
  svgafix.fon
  vgafix.fon
  vgafixe.fon
  vgafixg.fon
  vgafixr.fon
  vgafixt.fon
  

If you really want Fixedsys as a console font, get a Fixedsys clone that is available as a TrueType Font (TTF). One such clone is FixedsysTTF which can be used on the console. Set it to size 16 and Bold and it looks exactly like Fixedsys does by default.

Ipe: Using a different font

Text included in Ipe figures are rendered using the default LaTeX font which can sometimes look pretty thin. To use a different font for a Ipe figure, open Edit → Document Properties and add the font package in the Latex preamble section. For example, the left figure was generated using default font and the one on the right using this font package:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[math]{iwona}

Beamer: Fonts

If you are not satisfied with the font themes that ship with Beamer, you can use any font family you want for your Beamer document. The font family you intend to use has to be available as a package. For example, to use the Helvetica font family include:

\usepackage{helvet}

The font theme has to match the style of the font family, else the resulting document may have a mix of fonts used in it. That is, use the serif font theme for a serif font family and so on. For example, to use the Concrete Math font family (which is serif):

\usefonttheme{serif}     % Font theme: serif
\usepackage{ccfonts}     % Font family: Concrete Math
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Font encoding: T1

Sometimes, a font encoding may also have to be specified for the font family. For example, the T1 font encoding for Concrete Math font family in the example above.

Beamer: Font Themes

A Beamer font theme represents the style of the font used in the document. Beamer comes with the following predefined font themes:

• default (This is sans serif.)
• professionalfonts
• serif
• structurebold
• structureitalicserif
• strucutresmallcapsserif

To set the font theme for a Beamer document use the \usefonttheme command in the preamble of the document.

For example to set the font to serif:

\usefonttheme{structurebold}

Adobe Acrobat: Embedded Font Error

Cannot extract the embedded font 'Foobar'. Some characters may not
display or print correctly.

You may see this error with Adobe Acrobat 8 when you open certain PDF documents. If the Foobar font has been used all over the PDF, all you see of the document will be gibberish!

Adobe says they have fixed this error in their Acrobat 8.1.1 update:

#1572280 Type 3 fonts with missing operators. PDF documents that contain Type 3 fonts with missing operators are non-compliant with the PDF specification. These non-compliant PDF documents are typically generated by third party products. When trying to opening the document, users see an error message, “Cannot extract the embedded font ‘F0′. Some characters may not be displayed or printed correctly.” PDF documents open correctly in Reader/Acrobat 7.x, but not 8.0 or 8.1. The root cause is Type 3 fonts that do not comply with the PDF specification, which requires either the ‘d0′ or ‘d1′ operator in every Type 3 character procedure. In version 7.x, if the offending character was not displayed, the PDF document opened normally. Version 8.0 catches this error even if the character is not displayed. The updated behavior will ignore the missing operator when the character procedure is empty.
Root: fixes an issue in versions 8.0 and 8.1, not present in earlier versions.

However, installing the 8.1.1 update does not really fix this error! In fact, even though I incrementally updated all the way up to 8.2, the error is not solved. 8.2 is the last Acrobat 8.x update available for the 8 series.

There does not seem to be any solution to this error by Adobe. It does not seem to be fixed even in the 9.x series of Adobe Acrobat (see Mark Kostka’s comment below). The solution seems to be the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader. The PDF documents display and print without any problem in these readers!

Windows: Installing Fonts as Standard User

A Standard User cannot possibly have the permissions to install fonts for the entire Windows system. So, what I mean is how can a Standard User elevate himself to an Administrator to install fonts?

The Run As trick does not work for Fonts. If you Shift + right-click on the Fonts shortcut, you do not see any option to execute it as Administrator or any other user. Neither is Fonts a Control Panel (.cpl) file, so cannot be launched by the runas.exe command-line program.

The Fonts dialog is actually just the C:\Windows\Fonts directory being presented in a special way by Windows Explorer. That gives us a way to install fonts as a Standard User.

Launch Windows Explorer with Administrator privileges. Type in C:\Windows\Fonts in the Address bar. You can now install fonts.

LaTeX: Font Sizes

LaTeX has 9 font sizes:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\begin{document}

\tiny{tiny}
\scriptsize{scriptsize}
\footnotesize{footnotesize}
\small{small}
\normalsize{normalsize}
\large{large}
\Large{Large}
\LARGE{LARGE}
\huge{huge}
\Huge{Huge}

\end{document}

Windows: Fonts Folder

Windows Explorer displays the contents of the Fonts folder (C:\Windows\Fonts) in a special way. You may need to be aware of this if you need the complete path of a particular font. For example, as input to a command-line program (say adding text to an image using Imagemagick) or in your application code.

• Explorer does not display the filenames of the fonts. You cannot see the filename no matter what kind of View you switch Explorer to.
• Also, Explorer displays the fonts grouped by Font Family. (Note that the Fonts directory is actually completely flat, there are no subdirectories in it. The Font Family grouping is GUI sugar by Explorer.) Only obscure fonts which are alone are displayed as individual fonts. The Font Family is like a folder in Explorer, open it to see the individual fonts.

fontext.dll seems to be the special DLL that Explorer uses for displaying the Fonts folder. (C:\Windows\System32\fontext.dll) It can be observed that Windows creates a temporary fontext.dll.mui whenever the Fonts folder is opened in Explorer, this indicates that this DLL is being used. (.mui or MUI is Multilingual User Interface, a Windows technology to enable user interfaces in multiple languages on the same computer.) There seems to be very little information available about this DLL.

Anyway, to see the font filename, right-click the individual font and open its Properties. (For example, Consolas Bold turns out to be consolab.ttf)

Or you could open up a command window and look at the contents of the C:\Windows\Fonts directory. You will also notice that all the fonts actually have only a 8.3 filename! Even the newer Vista and Windows 7 fonts!

PS: I also noted with a tinge of sadness that the old Add Fonts dialog box had finally been laid to rest in Windows 7. It cannot be found or invoked from anywhere. This decrepit looking dialog box had been in Windows since the days of Windows 3.1 for almost 20 years (upto Vista).