Hi All,

I typed a resumé for a friend and, when it came to printing it, obtained some further experience.

I'm on an iMac with OS X 10.6.4 although I guess 10.6.5 is available now.

The document was one page, using but three fonts: Times Roman, Times Bold, and Helvetica Bold. I tried printing directly from PageStream and also via the Mac print system.

When using the Mac system, <PageStream -> Preferences... -> General> in the 'Interface' area has <Use System Printing> check-marked. When not check-marked, the PageStream print system kicks in!!! Well, that's my understanding.

When the PageStream print system is used, the PPD file is the exact same one that I use on the Amiga for my HP 2605dn color laser printer, and this is the PPD file that the Mac system has been told to use.

With the plain-jane version of the resumé, both the Mac print system and the PageStream system printed the document correctly -- in black & white.

Next the doc was modified by using different fonts for certain 'header' lines. The body font Times Roman was not changed.

First trial was to use Zapfino, one of the iMac's system fonts, in the headers. On PageStream's page, all looked great. However, on printing, both the Mac system and the PageStream system both failed. The Mac system could only handle the uppercase letters, while the lowercase ones were replaced with the character ?-on-a-black-background.

The PageStream system faired better but could not handle the extreme accenders/descenders that Zapfino uses. Hence the elegant ascenders/descenders were cut off. Additionally, PageStream could not handle the three, two-letter combinations 'rt' and 'is' and 'es' as they occur in the words 'Firth' and 'History' and 'References' -- respectively. These 'ligatures' --- if that is what they are -- were replaced by the ?-on-a-black-background guy. In Zapfino, it is hard to know when a two slug string is a ligature or not, since just about everything looks 'ligaturish'. For example, 'en' looks like a ligature but the PageStream system handled it without a problem.

However, with Zapfino, I had a trial where the "direct from PageStream" printout was just as bad as the Mac system product. So .....!?!?!?!?

At this point, I stopped using the PageStream system and stayed with the Mac system for the next trials.

Next, the font Apple Chancery was used for the header lines. Almost okay, but Apple Chancery may use st and es as ligatures --- not sure about that --- but anyway they would not print and were replaced by a single hollow square. On the other hand, the 'rt' combination printed properly when set by Apple Chancery. On the PageStream page, all looks fine.

Next "Big Caslon Medium" and "Cochin Italic" were tried. Same problem as with Apple Chancery, both st and es were replaced with a hollow square when the active font was Cochin Italic. Again, on the PageStream page, all looks fine.

In my adventures with TeX (on the iMac) which produces PDF files, I've used many weird fonts, including Zapfino and Apple Chancery, and at no point was there any problems; i.e., any character that appeared in the PDF preview was printed correctly.

One point that might be of interest to Mac users was:

Initially, the Mac print system seemed to be confusing the color laser printer. Upon receiving the job, the printer would complain about a lack of paper in the manual feed slot, and one had to press a certain button to get a printout. When the printed page was ejected, it was immediately followed by another copy of the same page; i.e., a "2 copies" print instead of the specified "1 copy" print.

This appears to have been fixed by:

When the Mac 'Print' panel appears, select "Paper Feed" instead of "Custom Feature" and then specify that the "All pages from" field be set to "Tray 2" (in my case) instead of the default "Auto Select". Now the printer does not complain and I get the desired single copy.

So, I'm wondering how other Mac users are faring with respect to printing some of the fancier fonts via 5058!

What about saving as a PostScript file and then looking at it with Preview? Tried that and in Preview, only the uppercase letters of Zapfino survived with the lowercase letters replaced with whitespace. However, when the 'Sidebar' is open, one is presented with a thumbnail of the file, but its name ends with '.pdf'. Perhaps, Preview translates .ps into .pdf and does a bad job. How can one look at the PostScript file using GhostScript on the Mac?

Did not experiment with other fancy fonts, and did not bother to print the PostScript/PDF (!?!?!?) file.

Don Green Dragon
fergdc@Shaw.ca