Creating PDFs with LaTeX

 

Check fonts of the document

To check whether all fonts are embedded, we recommend Adobe Reader. There you can find the entry "Datei" via the pull-down menu "Eigenschaften". In the document properties you will find a list of all fonts used in the document in the third tab under "Fonts".
Behind each font either "(embedded subset)" or "(embedded)" must appear.

 
 

Check individual embedded graphics/files

If there are common fonts such as Arial, Calibri, Times, Helvetica among the non-embedded fonts in your document, in most cases they are captions of graphics embedded as PDF in the LaTeX document.

This means:

  • The fonts must also be embedded in the individual PDF files of the graphics so that they are correctly transferred to the overall document. One cause of error could be that the fonts are not automatically embedded when compiling. The solution is to open each PDF graphic once in a vector graphics program (such as the free Inkscape), select "Embed fonts" when importing, and save it again as a PDF.
  • If necessary, check whether the software used to create the PDFs has an option for automatic embedding or save the files as image files, for example in .png format.
  • Note: Additional pages added by your institute or by a publisher may also contain non-embedded fonts.


 
 

Avoid Bitmap Fonts (Type 3 Fonts)

PDF

It also happens that LaTeX packages used to display special characters and symbols use so-called "Type 3" fonts.
These are usually bitmap fonts that must not be used for quality reasons.

Possible solutions:
Here it may help to switch to a similar package for individual characters/symbols, for example from:
\mathds to \mathbbm.

The following commands can also solve the problem in some cases:
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} or
\usepackage{lmodern}

 
 

Interactive table of contents via the bookmarks bar

Table of contents

With packages like "hyperref" you can generate an automatic table of contents from your LaTeX file. This will be displayed in PDF viewers like in the figure.

If you edit your PDF file after compiling it with other PDF tools, the links in the document may be lost, which means that the interactive table of contents will also no longer be displayed.
Creating a table of contents manually or even transferring the table of contents from a previous version via copy&paste is supported by PDFXChange viewer and Acrobat Pro, among others.

IMPORTANT: Always check after each change you make whether it affects other areas and the layout of the file in general.
The PDF version must be identical to the printed version, so it is important that line and page breaks are not moved.