Embed fonts in PDF files for press

I was contacted by the publishing house, saying that they needed fonts to be embedded in the PDF file for my thesis to be published. It had been a while since I generated that file and I was busy, so I asked them to use the alternative solution at the time.

Since it is commonly required for press, I think it is better that I get things done right when I need to generate any PDF file for that purpose next time. So I did some research on the web. It turned out to be very easy with modern free tools - ghostscript and LaTex.

I use LaTex mainly, but I believe it is similar if you can generate a postscript file from other tools. To convert .ps file to .pdf file, simply type

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress yourfile.ps

This will generate yourfile.pdf. Open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader (8 or later), and select File->Properties, click on the font tab, you will see what fonts are embedded. If everything goes well, all fonts listed there should be listed as embedded. Kpdf included in KDE 3.5 or later can also show fonts.

Sometimes I use pdfLaTex to generate PDF files directly. Luckily recent versions (3.1415926-1.40.x) of pdfTex already have fonts embedded by default.

So the problem is solved, this is way too easy!

Although some are a little bit outdated, these sites provided me very good information:
A guide to generate PDF files with all fonts embedded using pdflatex and Creating PDF files with ps2pdf and ps2pdf: PostScript-to-PDF converter