[texhax] printing fonts... off topic...

[Alan Litchfield]

Hi George,

Just coming in late to the conversation here.

This is a problem that turns up from time to time with pdfs that are  
produced from, for example, QXP. I usually see the problem on files  
printed from Windows PCs rather than Macs and the problem appearing on  
Canon printers rather than, say, HP.

I think you are right that the problem is likely related to the  
printer driver. Have you tried printing to the same printer with just  
the generic ps driver? Normally printer drivers are able to fudge  
missing fonts from your system by using the font outlines in the pdf,  
but that is not always successful and so you get blanks. Lesser  
drivers are less able to do this successfully.

When I have had this problem I have in the past found the easiest  
solution is to postscript and distill the file, and let the distiller  
or printer driver use default fonts from the system. Not always pretty  
but at least you can read what is supposed to be in there. If you want  
to replace the fonts with something that is similar to what was there  
originally then you can usually set the fonts to replace specific ones  
that are missing in the Distiller prefs.

An alternative, if you have Illustrator handy, is to open the file and  
replace missing fonts that way.

Umm, another way may be to save the file as a tiff from Preview and  
print that.

Good luck

Alan

On 30/05/2008, at 8:40 AM, George Georgalis wrote:

> On Thu 29 May 2008 at 08:52:03 AM -0500, Alex Scorpan wrote:
>> Views and prints fine on my Mac, OS 10.5.3, with Preview.
>>
>> You should try clearing the font caches?
>
> At this point I think it's the print driver (or possibly pre
> processing the driver data).  Because I don't have any problem
> when I use my printer as a ps printer. When I use the Lexmark C534
> print driver, that print copy has missing text.
>
> Presumably other print drivers have the problem too (tm).
>
> // George
>
>
> -- 
> George Georgalis, information system scientist <IXOYE><
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--
Alan Litchfield MBus(Hons), MNZCS
AlphaByte
PO Box 1941, Auckland, NZ. 1140
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