Missing Symbols PDF

Attention conservation notice: This is a fix for a very niche problem. Unless your printer is eating certain character from your print job, you had best move on. The punchline is: flatten the PDF.

The printer at work, a Ricoh IM C6500, doesn’t get along well with me. Sometimes, when printing a PDF it will garble the output and omit a lot of symbols. It drops math symbols and particular kernings, in particular ff. This makes it di icult to read papers.

Yapping with a colleague revealed that the issue might be the PDF to postscript conversion process. Running the following,

convert -density 300 document.{pdf,ps}

yielded lots of the error message:

**** Error: Invalid BaseEncoding name "StandardEncoding" ignoring
BaseEncoding.
Output may be incorrect.

It seems that this encoding is documented in the Adobe PDF Reference p. 306.

Latin-text font programs produced by Adobe Systems use the Adobe standard encoding, often referred to as StandardEncoding. The name StandardEncoding has no special meaning in PDF, but this encoding does play a role as a default en- coding (as shown in Table 5.11 below). The regular encodings used for Latin-text fonts on Mac OS and Windows systems are named MacRomanEncoding and WinAnsiEncoding, respectively.

Someone recommended printing the PDF from gimp. Another recommendation was to use pdftops to get a PostScipt file and print that.

pdftops document.{pdf,ps}

This produced some glitchy PostScript file that only printed as one page. Weird!

It turns out that GhostScript is active behind the scenes in all of this. The version that ships with my current Ubuntu install is quite old. So, following this nine year old AskUbuntu thread, I installed a new fresh GhostScript.

mkdir /tmp/gs; cd !$
wget https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/download/gs10071/ghostscript-10.07.1.tar.gz
tar xvf ghostscript-10.07.1.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-10.07.1/
sudo ./configure
sudo make install

This built it fresh from source. After that, the convert -density 300 document.{pdf,ps} command didn’t produce the BaseEncoding errors anymore. A quick print test run revealed that the PDF print job still contained missing errors.

Flatten the PDF #

Updating GhostScript didn’t seem to help. The printed PDF still lacks certain symbols. Eventually, after a whole morning of bashing my head against the keyboard, I admitted defeat. I realized that one could just flatten the PDF to a raster format like djvu. This would essentially make the document in to an image and I could print that image.

pdf2djvu -o document.{djvu,pdf}

And that solved it!

Published: May 20, 2026 @ 10:27.
Last Modified: May 22, 2026 @ 16:51.

Missing Symbols PDF

Flatten the PDF #

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