Fixing "font not embedded" issue to pass the IEEE PDF eXpress check

We recently had to make the format of a paper complaint with the IEEE PDF eXpress format. The paper did not pass the check in the first few attempts. Hence this blog post. I'd like to thank my colleague Ning Shang who did the most of the fixes to get it working. I am listing the fixes here so that anyone else who encountered similar issues may find this post useful.

Before that, I work on Ubuntu 9.04, kile 2.1 (the IDE), use the tools latex, bibtex and dvipdf to generate pdf files from tex/bib/cls files. (i.e. latex file.tex; bibtex file; (to attach the ref.bib file) latex file.tex; dvipdf file.dvi to finally get file.pdf)

The tex file uses the IEEE conference style. Additionally we used the following packages initially:
times, epsfig, graphicx, url, verbatim, amsmath, amsfonts


Issue #1: Document contains bookmarks
Fix: We had to remove the url package from the included packages lists and convert \url{address} to {address} in ref.bib.

Issue #2: Font Times-Italic, Times-Roman, Times-BoldItalic, Times-Bold, Helvetica, Courier is not embedded.

You can see what fonts are embedded and what are not, by using "pdffont file.pdf" and looking at the "emb" column. In our case, it did show that some fonts are not embedded.

Fix: We searched the Internet [1, 2]and found that in order to fix this (i.e. to embed all the required fonts) we need to do the conversion from tex to pdf in two stages. This is a dirty hack; but it works.

latex file.tex
bibtex file
latex file.tex
latex file.tex (Now we have file.dvi)
dvips -Ppdf -G0 -tletter file.dvi (Now we have file.ps)
ps2pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress file.ps file.pdf (Now we have file.pdf)