Getting dvips to refrain from embedding bitmap fonts

This document describes how to get dvips to generate postscript files that do not contain embedded bitmap fonts. Some of the reasons for wanting to do this are described are described elsewhere.

A more detailed explaination of this process is given by a document on Adobe's website. This is intended to be a shorter description that doesn't explain the process as much.

The font substitution list

You need to create a font substitution list file for use by dvips. Each line of this file starts with the name of a font as used within TeX, such as cmb10. The rest of the line can contain:

nothing - the generated postscript will just contain references the the named font
white space, followed by a name (such as CMB10) - - the generated postscript will just contain references the the second name
while space, followed by a <, followed by a file name - the file name should be a type 1 encoding of the postscript font in PFB or PFA format.

Specifying a font substitution list

If your home directory contains a file .dvipsrc containing a line:

p +fontMapFileName

that font map will be used for all dvips jobs you run. Alternatively, you can create a file such config.embed which contains the same line. Then, when you invoke dvips with the command dvips -P embed ... , it will look for config.embed in the current directory (and perhaps your home directory). How dvips looks for config files is dependent on your installation and can be changed using the TEXCONFIG environment variable as described in the "Environment Variables" section of the dvips documentation.