Hello James
This is where I am now. I use CUPS as a printing
system.
As I said, CUPS is limited to the GS_LIB directories that are built into GhostScript. There is no good way to make it look elsewhere unless Grant Taylor &/| Till Kamppeter have added Craig.Drummond's patch to Foo-Matic. Or you could ask CD about this: Craig.Drummond@xxxxxxx
The problem of printing quality output to PDF
files is something that I want to solve for ordinary users (it's part of a hands-on manual for KOffice). So this means that patching Qt is out of the question.
I do wish that they would fix that.
You can work around the incorrect PostScript names font by font by creating an alias for GhostScript in the "Fontmap" file in the directory where the font is installed. Use the incorrect PostScript font name that the Qt PostScript driver uses in the PostScript file as an alias for the correct PostScript font name which GhostScript needs to find the font. This will allow you to use that font with Qt not embedding it and then GhostScript will still find it and embed the correct font as Type42. For example:
/Swis721BT-Roman (0003a___.pfb) ;
add the alias:
/Swiss721BT-Roman /Swis721BT-Roman ;
Would fix the weird problem with Swiss721 missing an 's' in the PostScript name with some versions (e.g. the one that comes with WordPerfect).
You would need to do this for each weight as well, but this fix will work.
So this is where I am now :
Using Type 1 fonts is ok => no problem.
Using Truetype fonts these fonts are embedded as bitmaps. It looks bad, but you can improve on this by setting the resolution to a higher number. Standard it is on 300 dpi, so you have a really bad staircase effect when you magnify in Acrobat. When you set it to 2400 it really looks ok to me even with magnification to high %. I suppose that for a reasonbable quality printed output 600 dpi or 1200 dpi could be sufficient. But I'm still testing this.
Type 3 fonts (I sometimes get these in my pdf, still have to find out where they come from) and the bitmaps look not too good in Acrobat 4 and 5. But With acrobat 6 it is a lot better I think. This is just a conclusion that I draw from looking at the output on my Windows PC?
I am starting tests now of converting tt fonts to Type one with tt2pt1. Perhaps you have something to say about this route?
It is possible that using FontForge:
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
to convert them might do a slightly better job.
However, it is preferable (unless you need other fonts) to make a PDF using: Times, Courier, Helvetica, Symbol & Zapf Dingbats that come with Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.x:
Download the M$-Windows version:
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/3.x/ar302.exe
You should be able to unpack this with WINE.
You want these files:
COBO____.PFB HVBO____.PFB TII_____.PFB SY______.PFB COB_____.PFB HVB_____.PFB TIR_____.PFB ZD______.PFB COM_____.PFB HVO_____.PFB TIBI____.PFB COO_____.PFB HV______.PFB TIB_____.PFB
You might find other places to download these if you Google for the file names.
Then you need the AFM files.
Get these from Adobe:
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/type/win/all/afmfiles/900-960/950/
Get the ones that correspond to the PFB files.
You need to change all the names to all lower case before installing them -- KRename will do that.
Using these fonts and not embedding them in the PostScript file should result in a PDF that doesn't have the fonts embedded. It will use the fonts that come with Acrobat Reader (Times New Roman, Courier New, & Arial [they have exactly the same metrics]) when it is displayed. Although you might need to use GhostScript 8.x to do that (not embed them).
-- JRT ___________________________________________________ . Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
