Re: Printing problem

["Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@csc-sun.math.utah.edu>]

Lars Hellstr{\"o}m <Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se> writes on Wed, 21 Oct
1998 15:43:05 +0100 (MET):

>> ... shouldn't the printer report some sort of error if a document
>> tries to use a font it does not have?

The problem is, it usually has no place to report that error (e.g.,
printers on parallel ports often have no upstream communication
channel at all), so the practice in both Adobe PostScript and
workalikes, like ghostscript, is to fall back to an internal font,
usually Courier, and hope that the encodings match so the output will
be at least somewhat recognizable.

Try this little 5-line test file on your favorite PostScript printer:

%!
/Frobnitz findfont 24 scalefont setfont
100 100 moveto   
(This is Frobnitz) show
showpage

ghostscript in interactive mode says

	Can't find (or can't open) font file Frobnitz.
	Substituting font Courier for Frobnitz.

and Courier is indeed what appears on the screen.

Adobe's showps and dpsexec (on Sun and SGI systems) say

	Frobnitz not found, using Courier.

and do so.

Sun's imagetool and pageview just silently substitute Courier without
any warning.

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