Fonts in pdf documents screwed up when generated with latex (specifically, pdflatex) on mac osx

Question

My colleague suggests that texniscope is somehow to blame and that I should try purging it from my system. I really hope not to have to resort to that!

Possible clues:<

Answer 1

It seems I found the answer, from http://www.stat.duke.edu/~dmm36/tech.php, pasted below. Alas, it appears I have to give up TeXniscope. I like TeXniscope much better than Skim because it's much simpler, has better keyboard shorcuts for paging, and Skim makes you manually refresh the pdf every time there's a latex error (otherwise Skim auto-refreshes).

Quoted from http://www.stat.duke.edu/~dmm36/tech.php:

After recently upgrading to Leopard, something very strange and terrible began happening with pdf files created by latex (MacTeX 2007 distribution). The punchline is that fonts were not being displayed correctly by any application that used Apple's native pdf engine (e.g. preview.app, skim.app, Texniscope.app, LaTeXit.app, but not adobe reader 8). More mysterious was the fact that the same document could render differently on multiple openings.

Much googling ensued, until I found a thread on the mac tex newsgroup which suggested that the problem lay in corrupted font caches. Another search brought about this hint on how to delete all font caches in Leopard. From the terminal, issue the following commands:

sudo rm -rf `lsof | grep com.apple.ATS/annex.aux | grep Finder | cut -c 66-139`

(replace lsof with /usr/sbin/lsof if /usr/sbin is not in your path)

sudo rm -rf /private/var/folders/*/*/-Caches-/com.apple.ATS

And then reboot. This fixed the font problem for me.

NB: part of this problem appears to be the result of TeXniscope.app screwing up the font cache. For example, if you delete the font cache, reboot, and open something in preview it will look fine, but as soon as you open something in TeXniscope again, back to the drawing board. If you are experiencing this problem and using TeXniscope as your pdf previewer, (as in aquamacs), you should switch to Skim as your pdf previewer. It's pretty nice, and the Skim wiki has instructions for how to integrate it with Aquamacs. TeXniscope isn't under active development anyway.