Open PDF Documents With Proprietary Fonts

Table of Contents

1 Introduction :
2 Arial MT? :
3 And what is the problem? :
4 Correctly read the document :
5 Embed the font in the pdf :
6 Permalink

1 Introduction :

I recently had to open a document from an insurance company with ArialMT font needed but not embedded in it.

2 Arial MT? :

It appears that the arial mt fonts are part of Microsoft Office suite. I am in debian…

3 And what is the problem? :

The document was read with xpdf and evince. Helvetica was used instead of Arial, making the € symbol appear with the ù symbol. That is not great when printing the document to send it back to the company.

4 Correctly read the document :

To get the fonts:

aptitude install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Then xpdf and evince still use helvetica, I don’t know why. It appears to be due to the fact they are CID fonts, yet I am no sure at all. Adobe reader, got from adobe works well. Okular also manage to correctly display the document.

aptitude install okular

5 Embed the font in the pdf :

Anticipating the need for reading the document with only access to evince, I tried to embed the font in it. It managed to do it using okular:

open the document with okular and the fonts installed
print to a file
the printed file has embedded fonts