Fastlane is a website used to facilitate the exchange of information between the National Science Foundation and its client community including researchers, reviewers, research administrators, and others interacting with NSF.

One important issue to be aware of when submitting PDF files to Fastlane is the requirement that all PDF files use type-1 embedded fonts. This means that Fastlane rejects PDF files produced by FrameMaker or GhostScript versions prior to 6.5, Hewlett-Packard Intelligent Scanners, PDFWriter, PhotoShop, and PStill. In general, you can dump Postscript out of these programs and then convert it to Fastlane-acceptable PDF with other tools, namely Adobe’s distill.

In order to get distill to use the correct type of fonts, you will need to use the -compatlevel 3.0 -subsetfonts off -embedallfonts on options. You can either specify these on the command line, or the first time you invoke distill, you will prompt you for your preferences (which it stores in a file in your home directory called AcrobatDistiller). If you specify use 3.0 new features when prompted, you will get this behavior by default.