So IEEE wants PDFs that appear on IEEExplore to have two properties:

• all fonts are embedded
• the compatibility level is 1.4

Seems simple, right? Except that their instructions for PDF Express are for those who use Adobe Distiller, which I don’t have. You’d think there would be a simple workaround, but no…

This post suggests using ps2pdf command line options, which works if all of your figures are in EPS, but not if you have PDF or JPG figures. Daniel Lemire suggests converting the PDF to PS and then back to PDF.

That didn’t really work for me — I alternately got errors saying they wanted Adobe version 5 or higher (corresponding to compatibility level 1.4) or that fonts were not embedded. I blame Mac OS. On the 10th attempt at uploading, I finally got it to work. Here’s what I did:

1. Generate the PDF however you like (command line or TeXShop)
2. Open the PDF in Preview, duplicate, and save a copy. This will embed the fonts but make the PDF version 1.3 or something. Say the file is called copy.pdf.
3. In a terminal, run pdf2ps copy.pdf to generate copy.ps. This will create a PS file with the fonts embedded.
4. Run pdf2ps14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true copy.ps to generate a new version of copy.pdf that is both 1.4 and has fonts.

This is dumb. I wasted about an hour on this idiocy and still don’t understand why it’s such a pain. It seems that on a Mac, dvips does not embed fonts properly by default, and pdflatex also cuts corners. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like one can pass command line options (and make them default in TexShop) to automate this process.

I am sure there are better ways of doing this, but for the time being, this at least works.