Symbol font in PDF files not showed

In case someone is still looking for a solution.

Open the pdf in Preview(.app) and preview the same file as .pdf
Save this generated preview. It has all the fonts embedded and it works in the iPad.

This is really bad of Apple. I just noticed that most of my math PDF's are unreadable. Opening stuff in preview on my mac is a stop gap, and often useless since I download my papers from the web, or use Sente for library storage.

It turns out if you jailbreak the device then you can install symbol fonts. I do not want to do that. Why is apple forcing me to jailbreak in order to read academic texts? It was supposed to be a device used for education, all it is good for is reading overpriced magazines.

APPLE if you are reading this, fix this. You cannot have a reading device with fonts missing, ever tried doing lambda calculus with half the fonts missing. You need to install the symbol font and allow people to install other fonts.

Seriously, how ridiculous can you get - you are forcing people to jailbreak so they can read academic texts.

Publishing math pdf's without embedding the required fonts seems to defeat the whole purpose of using the so-called "portable document format". If you could provide the url of an example available from the internet as I would like to have a look at one.

Maybe publishing PDF without embedding fonts is bad practice. But people do it. Now either you go on a crusade forcing everyone to embed, or you provide the font, or the means to get it. I choose to expect from Apple to provide a portable reader with a functionality that allows me to read papers using math symbols. I do not expect them to foresee every type of font, but symbols, seriously. I understand that some people will never find fault with Apple, but this time there is no excuse. Basic fonts for reading academic papers should be in the system, and the ability to add fonts should be provided.

Not sure why you would like to have a look at a PDF without fonts, its not fun to read formulae with symbols missing. Obviously if you download this and embed on your computer it works. But now imagine I have a Sentge library of thousands of papers, some with comments made in Acrobat. I have to open each paper, print to PDF, which flattens the paper so I cannot edit comments and then save to Sente.

Here are links to paper in semantics/logic.

http://www.springerlink.com/index/P148487157215340.pdf

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/nu/471/F03/grosu%2Blandman.pdf

Its ridiculous what apple has done. People have and will forget to embed fonts, this appliance was supposed to be functional and on the go, It is not. This is not a trivial problem. The stupidity of the solution is highlighted by the FAQ advice on iPad PDF viewers. One the most recommended viewers Goodreader states on its FAQ (http://www.goodreader.net/gr-man-trouble.html#pdfscrambled)

From Goodreader PAQ:

" Some characters (Asian, Arabic, special math symbols, etc.) in my PDFs are unreadable, but they appear correctly on my Mac/PC

The reason - fonts are not embedded into a PDF file. iOS carries only a limited subset of certain fonts.

There's a very easy workaround for this. You have to embed all fonts into a PDF file.

If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then re-save this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will contain all fonts.

If you have a PC computer, the solution would be to reassemble a file in Adobe Acrobat software embedding all fonts into it. Print your file to a special Adobe PDF printer (installed by Acrobat). Make sure that inside this printer's settings, on Fonts tab Embed all fonts checkbox is on."

Obviously, there are a lot of people who experience this problem. The solution seems to be to carry a laptop with you iPad.

adam1967 wrote:

Not sure why you would like to have a look at a PDF without fonts

Just to see for myself how such papers are being published. Thanks for the example. It does embed 3 fonts -- LucidaMathSymbol, MathematicalPiFour, and TimesPhoneticAlternate -- but not Symbol.

I guess I agree that Apple really should provide an old-style Symbol font with iOS if such things are common.

The continued use of this font for composing is unfortunate, however, since it makes the text unsearchable (try looking for λ) and non-repurposable (try copy/pasting), as well as essentially non-portable when embedding is forgotten.

PS I need to amend that statement at the end. Search and copy/paste does not work in Adobe Reader, but for some reason does work in Apple Preview, which seems to convert the non-Unicode parts of that pdf to Unicode for display. Not sure how...

I just found this tutorial on Adobe's site, which shows how to embed fonts using Acrobat:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/acrobat-x-tips-tricks/quick-tip-how-to-embed-fonts-in- a-pdf/

with the document opened

advanced->Preflight->PDF fixups->embed fonts

and then hit "analize and fix" on the bottom-right.
Then it asks to save the new "fixed" file.

You do realize this thread is well over a year and a half old, right?

James Ward4 wrote:

You do realize this thread is well over a year and a half old, right?

Plus I think the problem about the old Symbol font not being included in the iOS pdf reader was fixed by Apple sometime after the last post in 2011.

And embedding fonts into a PDF presents it own issues, not the least of which is a tendency to bloat the file.

James Ward4 wrote:

And embedding fonts into a PDF presents it own issues, not the least of which is a tendency to bloat the file.

Not embedding fonts in a PDF defeats the whole purpose of the format, which is that the doc should look the same regardless of what machine you view it on. OS X normally embeds them as far as I know.