The TeX FAQ

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Fonts

Weird characters in dvips output

You’ve innocently generated output, using dvips, and there are weird transpositions in it: for example, the fi ligature has appeared as a £ symbol. This is an unwanted side-effect of the precautions outlined in generating PostScript for PDF. The -G1 switch discussed in that question is appropriate for Knuth’s text fonts, but doesn’t work with text fonts that don’t follow Knuth’s patterns (such as fonts supplied by Adobe).

If the problem arises, suppress the -G1 switch: if you were using it explicitly, don’t; if you were using -Ppdf, add -G0 to suppress the implicit switch in the pseudo-printer file.

The problem has been corrected in dvips v 5.90 (and later versions); it is unlikely ever to recur…

FAQ ID: Q-charshift