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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T02:07:41+00:00

While rendering a PDF file generated by PDFCreator 0.9.x. I noticed it contains an

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While rendering a PDF file generated by PDFCreator 0.9.x. I noticed it contains an error in the character mapping. Now, an error in a PDF file is nothing to be wondered about, Acrobat does wonders in rendering faulty PDF files hence a lot of PDF generators create PDFs that do not adhere fully to the PDF standard.

I trief to create a small example file: http://test.continuit.nl/temp/Document.pdf

The single page renders a single glyph (a capital A) using a Tj command (See stream 5 0 obj). The font selected (7 0 obj) contains a font with a single glyph embedded. So far so good. The char is referenced by char #1. Given the Encoding of the font it contains a Differences part: [ 1 /A ]. Thus char 1 -> character /A. Now in the embedded subset font there is a cmap that matches no glyph at character 65 (eg capital A) the cmap section of the font does define the character in exactly the order in the PDF file Font -> Encoding -> Differences array.

It looks like the character mapping / encoding is done twice. Only Files from PDFCreator 0.9.x seem to be affected.

My question is: Is this correct (or did I make a mistake and is the PDF correct) and what would you do to detect this situation in order to solve the rendering problem.

Note: I do need to be able to render these PDFs..

Solution

In the ISO32000 file there is a remark that symbolic TrueType fonts (flag bit 3 is on in the font descriptor) the encoding is not allowed and you should IGNORE it, using a simple 1on1 encoding always. SO all in all, if it is a symbolic font, I ignore the Encoding object altogether and this solves the problem.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The first point is that the file opens and renders correctly in Acrobat, so its almost certain that the file is correct. In fact it opens and renders correctly in a wide range of PDF consumers, so in fact it is correct.

    The font in question is a TrueType font, so actually yes, there are two kinds of ‘encoding’. First there is PDF/PostScript Encoding. This maps a character code into a glyph name. In your case it maps character code 1 to glyph name /A.

    In a PostScript font we would then look up the name /A in the CharStrings dictionary, and that would give us the character description, which we would then execute. Things are different with a TrueType font though.

    You can find this on page 430 of the 1.7 PDF Reference Manual, where it states that:

    “A TrueType font program’s built-in encoding maps directly from character codes to glyph descriptions by means of an internal data structure called a “cmap” (not to be confused with the CMap described in Section 5.6.4, “CMaps”).”

    I believe in your case that you simply need to use the character code (0x01) directly in the CMAP sub table. This will give you a GID of 36.

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