Greetings All,

Went to

http://neatfonts.com/

and fetched a bunch of Truetype fonts. Tried six of them out using PageStream 5.0.3.3 and found:

The fonts were:

(1) AcidDreamer Regular
(2) Anglo Saxon 8th C. Regular
(3) Ardenwood Demo Regular
(4) Argo Got Scaqh Regular
(5) AirBrush Medium
(6) BlackChancery Regular

Put them all on a sample page, and they were handled nicely by PageStream, but on attempting to print same pages, the PostScript file was sent to the printer (HP 2605) but the printer would NOT print anything.

Decided that it might have something to do with the 'new' fonts. So I tried the new guys one by one. Two of them --- (2) and (4) above --- caused the printer to choke. The other four printed nicely.

Each font file in question carries the suffix «.ttf» and as they were downloaded as files prepared for «Win» machine I thought there might be problems.

Any guesses to why two out of six would choke the printer?

Cheers Don (Green Dragon)
--

Ferguson, Don wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> Went to
>
>http://neatfonts.com/
>
> and fetched a bunch of Truetype fonts. Tried six of them out using PageStream 5.0.3.3 and found:
>
> The fonts were:
>
> (1) AcidDreamer Regular
> (2) Anglo Saxon 8th C. Regular
> (3) Ardenwood Demo Regular
> (4) Argo Got Scaqh Regular
> (5) AirBrush Medium
> (6) BlackChancery Regular
>
> Put them all on a sample page, and they were handled nicely by PageStream, but on attempting to print same pages, the PostScript file was sent to the printer (HP 2605) but the printer would NOT print anything.
>
> Decided that it might have something to do with the 'new' fonts. So I tried the new guys one by one. Two of them --- (2) and (4) above --- caused the printer to choke. The other four printed nicely.
>
> Each font file in question carries the suffix «.ttf» and as they were downloaded as files prepared for «Win» machine I thought there might be problems.
>
> Any guesses to why two out of six would choke the printer?
>
>
> Cheers Don (Green Dragon)
>

Could be reencoding. If a font says is uses Adobe Standard Encoding, but
doesn't include the full set, the PageStream reencoding can cause
problems. This is something that I am always tweaking it seems.

Deron

--
Deron Kazmaier - support@pagestream.org
Grasshopper LLC Publishing -http://www.pagestream.org
PageStream DTP for Amiga, Linux, Macintosh, and Windows

Greetings "PageStream Support" <deron@pagestream.org>
On 13/02/2010 at 16:47 you wrote concerning
Re: [PageStreamAmigaBeta] Truetype Fonts for Pagestream 5.0.3.3

Hi Deron,

<<snip>>
PS> Could be reencoding. If a font says is uses Adobe Standard Encoding, but
PS> doesn't include the full set, the PageStream reencoding can cause
PS> problems. This is something that I am always tweaking it seems.

If you do not reply to the following, I shall not be offended. But perhaps you need a moment or two away from the salt mine.

As is often the case I do not understand the above entirely! Take the case of «Anglo Saxon 8th c. Regular» which PageStream handles with grace, in terms of revealing the appropriate glyphs in the PageStream window. So I ask for a printout and PageStream ships out a PostScript file to my printer. Let's say there some character --- I'll call it lostchar --- that the font «Anglo Saxon 8th c. Regular» does NOT use (i.e., has no glyph for it) but lostchar IS a character recognized by «Adobe Standard Encoding». So let's assume Pagestream sends an incorrect encoding for lostchar! Why does it matter? How come the PostScript engine does not spit out a warning and continue, perhaps representing lostchar by the blank character or no character at all? GhostScript will often spit out all manner of threats but continue to process a file.

For example: I start in PageStream4 and use the «aleph» character --- first letter in Hebrew alphabet, I think --- using the Times-Normal font which encodes as \08488. I load the PageStream4 file into PageStream5, and with respect to font substitution ask that Times-Normal be replaced by «Times Normal». Well, it turns out that «Times Normal» does not have a glyph for aleph. What does PageStream5 do? PageStream5 does not throw up its hands in horror and reject the bloody input file, instead it places a «space character» where aleph should appear. That is not utterly satisfactory from my point of view, but it is much better than choking on the input file. Since I know that «Times Normal» is a poor choice for 'fancy' characters in PageStream5, I can highlight the blank which replaced aleph, and then apply the font «DejaVu Sans Book» and the result is that the space character is replaced by a rather tall rectangular character. Why? Because in «DejaVu Sans Book» the code for aleph is \08051 and somehow the
rectangular-looking guy is used as a default for «no character» --- at least in many instances. If, while «DejaVu Sans Book» is active, one enters
Ctrl-D + 8501 «return»
then up pops the aleph glyph. So why is it that PageStream5 handles these "inconsistencies" so nicely, and the stupid printer chokes on a couple of 'bad' re-encodings??? I'm beginning to think that something is wrong with the PostScript engine in my printer. I've had more damn trouble with that printer!!!!!

Good Font -- Bad Font
=====================
I looked at two of the .ttf files. One related to a font that printed, the other to a font that did not. Other than the names of the fonts, which appeared near the end of the files, the "good" file seemed to enclude an encoding; i.e., there was lots of stuff that looked like

numbersign dollar percent ampersand quotesingle parenleft
parenright asterisk plus comma hyphen period slash zero one two three four five six seven eight nine colon semicolon lessequal greater question at ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ bracketleft backslash bracketright asciicircum ...

and finished off with

..... macron breve dotaccent ring cedilla hungar umlaut ogonek caron

The above has been "edited" --- and probably with errors --- since the Escape character --- looks like an outlined box --- that appears in Notepad vanishes upon a COPY operation and everything is jammed together in the copy that appears in Yam's window. Also, Notepad does not reveal any 'encoding' codes as I expect to see when I examine a PostScript file created by PageStream. Anyway, I suspect the above suggests some sort of encoding going on.

The "bad" guy did not have anything akin to the above!!! At least the searches I made did not turn up any similar data.

Amongst the various unpacked .zip files I stumbled across an interesting Ascii file. It contained a lengthy discussion about how to install the font files on Windows and Mac machines. In the case of Windows, there were several references to Windows 95 (!!!!) and its deficiencies with respect the fonts. I had to laugh because a good friend of mine still uses Windows 95, and I like to kid him about being the only Windows 95 user in existence.

Cheers Don (Green Dragon)
--