Thus spake Cedric Sagne: All of us know that Arial is a somewhat problematic font. In particular, a thick ll appears in PDF, when displayed on screen. I've known about that and kept clear of Arial.
I was really surprised to export a PDF with Arial and discover the issue does not appear on Foxit Reader, but only on Adobe Reader 8.1 ! Any explanation as Arial remains a pleasant font to work with? I'm afraid I don't have any insight into why Arial sometimes works and sometimes doesn't - but I can certainly attest to Foxit Reader being a far superior product. Since Acrobat Reader 5, Adobe's products have been getting fatter and slower, until I just can't stand them anymore. Foxit tends to open in less than a second, even on my POS laptop, while Acrobat 7 or 8 takes upwards of 30 seconds the first time (it gets faster on subsequent PDFs, but only because a big chunk of the Reader remains loaded in memory.) While it starts up, Acrobat displays a list of the modules it's loading. It's a ridiculous parade of bloat; the most glaring example is "WebShoppingAPI" (that may not be the exact name, but it's something close to that.) By contrast, Foxit is lean and mean. (Possibly a little TOO lean and mean - if you want to use interactive PDFs, you need to download Foxit's Javascript module. It's not included by default.) I have noticed a few examples of the sort of thing you mention, although I hadn't narrowed it down to Arial. I suspect that Adobe is guilty of the Large Software Company heresy, which boils down to "We're big enough to create our own standards! - and by the way, if you insist on using free TrueType fonts instead of our patented money-makin' PS fonts, well, you deserve what you get! Muahahahahaha!" Foxit, being relatively tiny, probably feels a lot more pressure to be standards-compliant. (Yes, I'm aware that Arial comes from M$, which is certainly guilty of the Large Software Company heresy - but my point is that just about everybody has Arial, you don't have to pay extra for it, and everybody - except for Adobe - knows how to work with it. That can't be a coincidence.) There are a few third-party applications that insist on working only with Acrobat Reader; apart from those, I have taken to replacing Acrobat with Foxit on all of my clients' machines, and they thank me for it. Highly recommended. -- www.fsrtechnologies.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/attachments/20071129/24094bda/attachment.html
