These are powerful typesetting programs, and thus come with their own special difficulties for creating PDFs that ProQuest can publish. Being open-source programs, official documentation is sometime scant. There are large communities for them, however, such as http://tex.stackexchange.com/, where users ask and answer technical questions.
There are a few areas of concern:
- Fonts must be embedded. Here is some general advice about embedding fonts using LaTex: https://www.karlrupp.net/2016/01/embed-all-fonts-in-pdfs-latex-pdflatex/
- Type 3 fonts should be avoided. One especially problematic font issue related to the use of TeX and LaTex is the use of Type 3 fonts. TeX and LaTeX use Type 3 fonts by default. Type 3 fonts do not render well onscreen and can cause problems at the printer. Here is some advice about replacing Type 3 fonts with Type 1 fonts: http://dsanta.users.ch/resources/type1.html.
- For ideas about packages that don’t use type 3 fonts, this page might be helpful: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4922/why-do-some-fonts-used-by-siunitx-and-textcomp-look-rasterized
- Sometimes, only specialized fonts…mathematical symbols and such…are rendered as Type 3 fonts. Here is a list of fonts that include mathematical symbols rendered as Type 1 fonts: http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-psfchoice.html
- Sometimes, only the figures embedded in the document have type 3 fonts. If you are using matplotlib to create figures, this link will help: http://phyletica.org/matplotlib-fonts/ An alternative solution would be to rasterize the figures, so that the text is a part of the image.
- You can verify that there are no Type 3 fonts in your document by using Adobe Acrobat Reader (available for free at https://get.adobe.com/reader/).
- Open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Go to File-->Properties-->Fonts.
- The program will list all the fonts that you’ve used in your document, along with information about whether the fonts are Type 1, TrueType, or Type 3 fonts. In this example, we see a Type 1 font, followed by a couple of Type 3 fonts.
- Finally, it is possible to create graphs that are so complicated that they don’t render very well online, and often cannot be printed. Sometimes, we see a graph with hundreds or thousands of data points, many on top of each other. In this instance, those graphics should be rasterized. Here is a link that may be helpful in that regard: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85812/pdf-images-slow-scrolling