Faxing PDF in Windows 7 messes up fonts

2

I have to program a Windows service to send PDF documents generated by MS Access (I know, it's wrong but it's legacy and it works for now) via Winfax (modem). During testing I found that the automatic conversion to TIFF format messes up the document. The fonts are rendered completely wrong (stretched etc). When I tried to send a fax manually (via Windows 7 Fax and Scan utility) the same thing happens. You don't even have to send it, just previewing does the same thing. This doesn't happen to every PDF, only the ones "we" (someone else) have generated so I guess fonts were not embedded in the PDF (which may not even be possible in Access).

I wonder if there's any way to fix the rendering without changing the generation tool (it's quite fragile and don't like to touch it). I have installed a PDF viewer and there the documents are displayed correctly so I guess it should be possible to fix the conversion to TIFF as well...

Any suggestions?

Koen

Posted 2011-07-28T09:21:51.417

Reputation: 195

Answers

1

How about, (have your service) convert it to some format that will convert from the PDFs properly (BMP?), and then send that, as the fax system's TIFF conversion may work better using your generated image file/stream.

Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007

Posted 2011-07-28T09:21:51.417

Reputation: 103 763

I was thinking about that but what if my file has more than one page? Also this is not a neat solution so I'm looking for more options. I'm guessing this can be solved purely by configuration or installing some components on the fax server machine... – Koen – 2011-07-28T12:20:29.050

Asked: 2011-07-28T09:21:51.417

Viewed: 180 times

Active: 2011-07-28T12:13:03.107