Printing PDF's

Dcnblues · Post by **Dcnblues** » 2005-03-20 11:26:55

I create a document with headers and footers, and it looks fine, and I save as PDF, and the PDF looks fine on my mac, but when I send it to Kinko's for printing, there is a problem (if I remember right, with the header which is in a different font).

Kinko's works around the problem by printing the docs as images, but I'd like to get it working properly.

I know little about fonts, but could the header font I'm using be the issue? (#PCMyungjo) I thought that the PDF format removed such problems. Am I mistaken? Are there PDF docs that won't print cross platform?

This is over my head, but I found this recently:

Creating a PDF document is a 2-step process. The file is printed into a temporary PostScript document which in turn is converted to PDF. Eventually both documents need to embed font information to be rendered appropriately. The quality of the final document is heavily affected by how this is done. Using an advanced printer driver that is capable of understanding TrueType glyph information allows the embedding of a TrueType font in the Type42 format. This format is understood by ghostscript and acrobat distiller and therefore can be maintained in the PDF document. The GENERIC driver does not allow embedding as Type42 and forces the creation of Type3 font information. During conversion from PostScript to PDF this font information is converted into a graphical representation that displays poorly.

This seems like it might be related to a potential workaround I found on the mac support discussion site, but I haven't tried it yet:

I opened the PDFs in Preview (we are now running 10.3.5.) and then Exported them as... PDFs. Renamed them...

Dcnblues · Post by **Dcnblues** » 2005-03-20 13:25:37

more info I'm digging up:

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why a PDF file will fail to print, the following suggestions from Adobe and links to additional resources may help. Please continue to let us know which document you have experienced the problem with so that we can take other corrective action if necessary.

PDF And PCL Printers
There are known problems when printing PDF to a PCL printer (Hewlett-Packard Printer Control Language). Adobe's response to this issue is as follows:
“If your PDF file prints incorrectly to a PCL printer, try modifying the driver settings. In general, try raster graphics instead of vector graphics and bitmap fonts instead of outline fonts. (Each driver has different settings, so we cannot tell you exactly which settings to use - see your printer manual for details.) If your file still prints incorrectly, print to a Postscript Printer.

Alternate Suggestion:
Make sure to use a Postscript driver, not a PCL driver (which is typically the default driver for Windows/HP) Print to a certified Postscript printer with the latest drivers that support Postscript Level 3.

cchapin · Post by **cchapin** » 2005-03-20 13:44:58

I believe on Windows, users have to activate Asian double-byte fonts for them to work in a PDF file. That might be your problem. This activation might need to happen at the system level or at the application (Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat) level -- or very possibly both.

--Craig

Dcnblues · Post by **Dcnblues** » 2005-03-21 14:28:09

So it's confirmed that PDF's are useless for cross platform printing.

It would be valuable to have a list of fonts, if such a thing exists, that will actually function at cross platform printing. My needs are minimal, but I would like the fsck thing to print.

cchapin · Post by **cchapin** » 2005-03-21 15:17:16

I wouldn't say PDFs are useless for cross-platform printing. Not everyone needs complex Asian characters, so a Windows PC in a Kinko's outside East Asia probably wouldn't think to or bother to enable them.

If you're using #PCMyungjo for non-CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) text, it would probably be simplest to use a different font.

If you need to view or print PDF documents with double-byte Asian fonts on a Windows PC, see Adobe's support knowledgebase article on this.

--Craig

Dcnblues · Post by **Dcnblues** » 2005-03-21 16:02:42

cchapin wrote:If you're using #PCMyungjo for non-CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) text, it would probably be simplest to use a different font.
--Craig

It was just another english font available from the Nissus Writer Express font menu. I liked the look.

Apparently only a few fonts can be used for cross platform printing. A list of such fonts so that the PDF doc would actually print would be nice. Even a checkbox in the word processor to remove fonts that rendered PDF docs useless for printing would be nice.

Many, many, many computer users just want the dammed things to work without having to learn programming code.

cchapin · Post by **cchapin** » 2005-03-21 16:33:47

It's difficult to give you a list of non-double-byte fonts because there are so many of them, and I don't know what you have on your computer.

So instead I looked through the fonts on my system. I offer the following as guidelines to follow in avoiding fonts that might actually be Asian.

Avoid anything that begins with #.
Avoid fonts with names containing these words:
Fang
Hei
Heisei
Hiragino
Kaku
Kana
Li
Maru
Mincho
Ming
Myungjo
Pi
Ryo
Song
Sung

I hope this helps.

--Craig

Dcnblues · Post by **Dcnblues** » 2005-03-22 13:26:38

I don't think that helps much, but thanks for trying. My frustration is clearly the responsibility of the Adobe PDF format, and not Nisus Writer Express.

Just another case of programers promising something, and not realizing their paragraphs of requirements to make something work doesn't fly well with the general public.