Embedding fonts to pdf files....

.. can be painful. I've needed to do this twice, and both times it has been equally oppressive. First time, for my submission to ICALT 2009, I used pdflatex. This however, requires that you won't use eps figures and this can be sometimes impossible (especially if you have used massive amount of eps figures), and generally I just don't like pdflatex that much.

Today, it seems I found a way to embed fonts to latex based pdf files by using the latex->dvips ->ps2pdf way. So, this is what I did (and believe me, it took plenty of time to figure out):

1. I've been using these three command in my preamble. Have no idea why, but there they have been (most likely some of them are from the original template I've been using (phd thesis template of dept of CS)).
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{amsfonts}

2. Now, I found a link which pointed out that unicode might be the problem here... thus,

3. I commented fontenc and amsfonts away.... then

4. dvitops, and then

5. using this mighty spell, I got finally all the fonts embedded to the pdf file:
ps2pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true mainofficial.ps

(obviously, you need to change the mainofficial.ps to yourfilename if you're willing to give this a try)

Again, I don't understand all of this, but it does the trick and I'm happy with it. Now, using pdffonts and acroreads document properties it can be confirmed that all fonts are indeed embedded. Excellent. Now I can read my phd thesis with zoom levels such as 2400% and still have nice and clear fonts... what could be better than that??

http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/03/14/1879033.aspx

What should be automated?

What should be automated asked PhD Tedre in his article published in Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Human-centered multimedia.

Now, I'm asking how you should tell the user about the automation? Why? I tell you.

As you might know, we use this daylight saving time in Finland and that we changed to this time this year during the night between 28th and 29th of March. Naturally, this means that some of the clocks need to be changed manually to new time, and some, such as computers usually change the time automatically.

The problem with this is that you really don't know what devices change their time automatically and which dont. My wife changed her mobile phones time by herself on saturday evening. Everything fine, until this morning (Monday, March 30th). Her alarm, yes the mobile phone, went on at 5.50 instead of 6.50. Why? Because of the automated change. She had added one hour to the time on Saturday (would have caused alarm to go on at 6.50, which would have been ok) and then, at the right time, the automation did it again which, then, caused the infernal 5.50 alarm.

Thus. What should be automated is a really relevant question, but even more relavant is to let the user know what is automated. How this could be done, is a question I leave some else to answer.

PyXPlot

http://www.pyxplot.org.uk/

Handy.