Re: Different behaviour of NimbusMonL-Bold and Courier-Bold in PDF created by pdfwrite

On 9 Mai, 13:50, ken <k...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <51a6dff2-e452-40e6-83b0-2f3f531599d4
@x6g2000vbg.googlegroups.com>, pipi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...

This time I did run the commandline on Windows, and it yields (nearly)
the same results:

* The file size is nearly the same as the Ubuntu-made Courier-Bold-
glyphs.pdf, but it is 197212 Bytes instead of 190696 Bytes.

They should be identical (barring a few matedata style things, a few
bytyes at most), sounds like they are using different fonts for Courier-
Bold.

Given that...
...Ghostscript never does embed Courier or Courier-Bold,
and given that
...I could not even enforce embedding by adding
"-c .setpswrite <</AlwaysEmbed [/Helvetica /Times-Roman \
/Courier-Bold /Courier]>> setdistillerparams" to the
commandline (as adviced by the Ghostscript documentation)
how could there be different fonts used?

Yes,...
...both files were generated by 2 different GS versions on
two different platforms,
...but according to "pdffonts *.pdf" both _don't_ have
Courier-Bold embedded,
...and I open both files with the same application (that is
AcroRd32.exe) on the same platform
but I...
...still see distinct differences in glyph shapes depicting
the same character, and I
...still wonder why the very same glyphs that show up in the
big table grid may show a .notdef shape in the textstring
area on the lower left.

- for the next 4 pages each of the files is very
different to the other. These pages are headlined
"unencoded characters". Some of the glyphs have
swapped their locations. But even many of those
glyphs which are on the same location of the table
grid (examples for my case: Ccircumflex and
Cdotaccent are showing slight differences in size
and appearance).

I do not have any idea why this should be so. OK, both files have been
generated by two slightly different versions of Ghostscript on 2 very
different operating systems. But they both use an un-embedded Courier.
And they both are opened with Acrobat Reader on Windows, so they
should be using the same instance of Courier (wherever AcroRd.exe
finds it, I don't know) to render the pages. Why there are some glyphs
swapped to different places in the table grid for the "unencoded
characters" on pages 3-6 may well be due to the fact that both files
were generated on different platforms (maybe the generation process
used 2 different versions of prfonts.ps, I'll have to check that!).
But why those glyphs that are on the same locations do display
differences is beyond me.

Again, without seeing the file I can't tell really.

Would you accept me sending you the 2 files via direct or private
mail?
(< 400 kB in total)

However, you can't
use a font 'unencoded', at least not without using glyphshow, and I'm
guessing that's not the case.

When I open the prfonts.ps file shipped with Ghostscript, I do find
the 3 occasions of "glyphshow" but I do not fully comprehend the
PostScript code involved.

Even then the font *does* have an
encoding, its jut not being used.

OK.

Assuming that the Courier fonts on the two systems are different (see
Courier-Bold) above, the most likely explanation is that the default
encoding (all fonts *must* haev an Encoding) is different between the
two fonts.

But I'm looking at the 2 files on the *same* system, and both files
say they do not have Courier-Bold embedded, and both files use the
same object IDs for all 5 instances of the font (according to the
pdffonts utility).

One may be using StandardEncoding and the other might be
using MacRomanEncoding for instance.

Is there any utility that would tell me that info?

If you don't apply a specific encoding, then the glyphs which appear in
response to a given character code may be differnt between the two
fonts. This is most likely to be the case with character codes > 127.

All character codes from 0 to 255 seem to be the same for both files.
(However, I don't understand now how there can be more than 256
character glyphs in a Type 1 font. I thought there is a maximum of 256
items for each encoding table? Does it mean a font can define glyph
shapes for characters without assigning them a specific location in
the table, and just make them available via their character names?)

I didn't find out much yet about the "Type 1C" fonttype, and how it is
different from Type 1.

Compact Font Format.

OK. So it's basically the same as "Type 1" but compressed?

Sort of, the data representation is different, but the execution of the
font program is broadly the same. Its not quite as simple as
compression, its a more compact representation of the same information.

Currently I have no possibility to upload the files onto a webspace I
have control over. I'll research if there are websites which do offer
this as a public service.

However, everybody with Ghostscript installed can run the same command
and produce the "same" files :-)

Assuming everyone runs the same revision of GhostScript, on the smae
operating system, with the same fonts available and using the same
command line options. Not so easy to reproduce for certain.

That's why I used the quotation marks around "same"... :-)

Presumably because you allowed SubsetFonts true. Each page then gets its
own subset.

That was my first supposition too. But the PDFs are 6 pages long --
that should mean we'd have 6 different subsets, no?

Don't know, can't tell in the dark....

Correct, and the appearance of the two versions of Courier may not be
the same. THis also explains the slight positioning differences you see
when glyphs are not individually positioned, the widths (not kerning or
hinting) of the glyphs are not the same and so there are minor
positioning differences.

The problem is _not_ constrained to just minor width or minor
positioning differences. The _major_ difference is that some of the
very same characters whose glyphs draw fine in the big table grid are
not present at all in the text area of the lower left corner. They are
represented by the .notdef glyph there!

Well I was describing general differences, remember I'm not looking at
your file...

By the way, the /.notdef glyph in PostScript fonts is conventionally
empty, so it sounds like your viewer is using a TrueType font instead,
where the /.notdef glyph is conventionally a hollow square.

Thank you for that hint. Could turn out to be a very important one for
me to recognize subtle differences in files I'm looking at.

Could this be a bug in the prfont.ps utility, or a bug in Ghostscript?

Likely neither, you just need to do more research to understand exactly
what's going on. Font substitution always leads to problems, you should
really embed all fonts.

I would like to :-)

However, Ghostscript does not (yet) follow my intentions (most likely
I'm not yet a good enough tamer for that beast). :-)

Ken- Zitierten Text ausblenden -

- Zitierten Text anzeigen -

.

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