How to solve some fonts displayed as squares issue.

Question

                         Hi,
          I try to stabilize a pdf generation config with specific parameters to allow exact render of text with any reader.
1°| Configuration
RIP
Compatibility: pdf 1.5
Compression: images only, zip
Fonts: all integrated, no substitution.
[PDFCreator only:
ghostscript x64 9.06 (junction to a independant install as PDFCreator install 32b version)
use windows fonts yes
no fontmap files]
PRINTER
Substitution table: no substitution
Smallest vector font size: 10px
TrueType Fonts: Download as soft font
Postscript: Optimize portability
Download TrueType Fonts: Native TrueType
Postscript level: 3
Since this problem occurs for years now, i can mention 2 products and version concerned at now:
-PDFCreator version 1.6.2 (always occured as long as i can remember).
-novaPDF version 7.7 build 387
Reader affected is Adobe READER X version 10.1.5.33 (option use local fonts on or off no effect)
Reader not affected evince version 2.32.0.145
System Windows 7 x64 Fr
Browser Firefox 18.0.2
2°| Issue
You can encounter this problem even with testpage printing (Title replaced by squares) but it's not the most annoying case so i will present it true a webpage problem.
For instance with css supressed:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/specs/transport.html#soap
With Firefox configured with default font Times New Roman
Then try to print to pdf with either PDFCreator or novaPDF, open with Adobe reader you get :
Properties:
open with evince you get:
Properties:
Strange!
But now let's try to use a font from adobe reader Minion Pro.
properties:
with evince:
properties:
When saving to html file and open with LibreOffice Title appears to be verdana;helvetica;sans-serif.
Export to pdf give this:
(As export is not a printing i show this because long time ago i used makepdf if i remember which was not a printer.)
Is True Type not supported ?
Do i need to modify adobe reader config manually?
I need new ideas for a solution as it's not possible to ask everyone to use evince... and Times New Roman is not the only font causing this issue.
Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

Actually, because the difference was intriguing, I found a little more time. Here is a discussion of the problem. I do not expect it to mean anything to you, but can be passed along to the maintainers of GhostScript and/or PDFCreator if you wish.
The file was created by GPL GhostScript 9.06, application PDFCreator Version 1.6.2.
In creating this PDF, the three TimesNewRoman fonts were embedded, as symbolic fonts
with randomly assigned glyphs starting with index 0. No Encoding was used in the font
dictionary. They contain a (1,0) and (3,0) cmap subtable.
The TimesNewRoman font is set up almost correctly, with Flags 4 (symbolic), though 6 would be
better prthaps (symbolic, serif)
The TimesNewRoman,Bold and ,Italic fonts had Flags 34 and 98 respectively. Crucially, these
do not set the symbol flag (values of 6 and 70 respectively would work as expected).
ISO 32000-1 9.6.6.4 talks about how Encoding is managed for TrueType fonts. It identifies
two cases which should "ensure predictable behaviour across all conforming readers":
* A nonsymbolic font should specific MacRoman Encoding or WinAnsiEncoding.
* A font not using standard encodings should not specify an Encoding; should set the
Symbol Flag; and should contain a 1,0 subtable.
Neither of these cases apply to the ,Bold or ,Italic case (but the presence of a Symbol
flag would make them apply, and tests show this increases consistency).
Hence, this is in the territory officially described by ISO 32000-1 as "dependent on
the conforming reader" and not honouring "should follow certain guidelines to ensure
predictable behaviour across all conforming readers".
The behaviour of this PDF is not predictable, as has been seen (evince displays as expected
by the user, if not by the specification, while Acrobat, Mac OS X Preview and Chrome do not).
Recommend that the PDF creation module in GhostScript be modified to follow one of the
two cases above, for consistent rendering.