Re: Print to PDF from AppleWorks 5.1? - Yes, Virginia

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Hugh Hood wrote:
> Michael,
>
> Thanks for the compliment.
>
> The pcl - pdf engine embeds font subsets so that the reader need not have
> the original fonts installed.
>
> In the case of the proportional Times-Roman font that the AppleWorks PCL
> driver uses, the default substitute font is URW's "NimbusRomanNo4-Lig",
> although when the engine is actually built, other fonts (including
> originals) can be substituted.
>
> The engine uses the substitute fonts 'just in case' someone were to create a
> pdf without having 'embedding' privileges for the fonts they are using. As
> you know, most of us have bucket loads of fonts these days, and just about
> everything I own allows embedding into a .pdf. YMMV.
>
> In fact, the default fonts selected by the engine for the Monospaced fonts
> the AppleWorks PCL Driver uses (generally Courier and Letter Gothic) were
> wholly unsatisfactory, so when I built the engine, I used the real McCoys.
>
> Most printing (but not all) printing from AppleWorks is done with monospaced
> fonts, so I felt those were the most important.
>
> Anyway, I didn't really notice the "hflk" issue you mentioned with my (2)
> readers, Acrobat 8 (Mac) and Apple Preview.  Could I trouble you to get back
> to me with a specific page number so that I can take a better look?
>
> One more thing -- do you notice the same thing when the particular page is
> printed?

No, the printed page is perfect.

I see what produces the problem--Adobe Reader page scaling!

As I view page 1 (the first with Times Roman) on my machine
and change the zoom (fit page width, then vary the window size)
from 79% to 78.9%, the letters scale differently.

So 79% zoom and larger all look perfect, and 73.7% to 78.9% have
some letters larger than others!

It's a strange effect, which I realize I have seen before, but
never played with it to discover how it worked.

There must be some weird rule in Reader's font scaling, at least
on Windows.  BTW, as I change the zome smoothly, the line spacing
jumps up and down--no doubt a result of rounding to the nearest
raster line.  This font rendering issue is no doubt related.

> in article F7qdnZPvZ4xZBZLQnZ2dnUVZ5jednZ2d@giganews.com, Michael J. Mahon
> at mjmahon@aol.com wrote on 12/20/10 11:56 AM:
>
>
>
> > The .pdf is beautiful--this will make a very nice utility!
> >
> > One thing I noticed that is funny...the Times Roman font seems to
> > be mixed point size.  The lower-case letters "hflk" and "tuvwxyz"
> > (and probably more I didn't check) are larger than the rest, and
> > (at least) the digit 6 is smaller than other digits.
> >
> > Is this font embedded, or is this a rendering issue for Adobe Reader
> > on my machine?  Perhaps the point size is some fractional value??

-michael

NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."