OS X 10.5 font woes
Since moving to a Mac a bit over a year ago, I've had only a few reasons to look back ( the business with the HP LJ1022 printer being one of them). I'm now rather close to the end of my tether, and the reason is fonts.
As an academic and a computer scientist, I end up writing quite a lot of papers and presentations with maths in them. Like any sensible person, I use LaTeX for typesetting the maths; it's a lot easier to type $\sum_{i=0}^{i=n-1} i^2$ than to wrestle with the equation editor in Word. I've also been using LaTeX for rendering mathematical expressions in lecture slides; there are two tools - LaTeXit and LaTeX Equation Editor - which make putting maths in Powerpoint or KeyNote a drag-and-drop operation.
However, I've spent quite a lot of time over the last week trying to debug a problem with the font rendering of TeX-generated PDF files on OS X. If I wrote a LaTeX file containing the following:
\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \section{This is a test} \[e = mc^2 \rightarrow \chi \pi \ldots r^2 \] \end{document}
then I'd expect it to render something like this:
Preview renders it like that, but not reliably - perhaps one time in eight. The rest of the time, it randomly substitutes a sans serif font for the various Computer Modern fonts. Sometimes it looks like this (missing the italic font):
Sometimes it looks like this (missing the bold and italic fonts):
And sometimes it looks like this (missing the bold and symbol fonts):
It isn't predictable which rendering I get. The problem also isn't limited to CM, but appears whenever you have a subset of a Type1 font embedded in PDF (on my machine, at least); TeX isn't the problem. The problem didn't exist on 10.4. The best guess from the Mac communities is that it's a cache corruption problem with the OS X PDF-rendering component on 10.5 (which would explain why I see the same problem in LaTeXit, LEE and Papers, but not in Acrobat).
I really don't see how Apple could have let a release out of the door with a bug like this - this is surely a critical bug for anyone in publishing.
Edited to add links: