i am at a workplace where i can afford to use a non-mainstream product for things that i want to do. because, well i don't get paid enough to tow the line to standardization and i have enough power to control the destiny of my job to some extent. one of the products that i choose to use is openoffice.org for my word processing needs (for small documents, large or complicated documents get LaTeX). i still use excel and powerpoint because well excell rocks and powerpoint doesn't but at least powerpoint works really well with the tablet.
but back to openoffice.org writer. last week i wrote a lab for organic chemistry that taught students to draw chemical structures and also to embed them in microsoft word. i wrote the lab in openoffice.org because it is so much easier to control various things like outline format and picture layout in openoffice.org. one thing i didn't anticipate is that embedding the drawings in writer and then exporting to pdf meant that the fonts in the drawings were still fonts in the pdf. this is a good thing in many ways probably but it had one unintended consequence. one student opened up the pdf and printed it (good thing) but in the process some piece of equipment (either computer or printer) didn't have the symbol font. (i know... what doesn't have the symbol font?) so my letter pi curiously turned into a q (not sure what alternate font it chose). so i went looking for how to embed all the fonts in a pdf and yup it is there. writer does rock. so the way to do it and i'll probably do it with all pdf files that i post from now on given the variability in people's computers, is when you click on export to pdf it pops up a menu. one option is PDF/A-1. this is an archive format that anticipates that someday everyone will have different fonts so it forces the fonts to embed.
