You're right, the "times," "times new roman," "Helvetica," "courier," and "courier new" look just fine online. But what's really strange is that when the PDF file hits real paper, _all_ of the fonts look _great_. Even if I tell the printer driver to send the fonts to the printer as bitmaps, the text looks poor online. Again, on paper it looks perfect. Strange.
Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: David Boyes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 2:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: OT (somewhat) - ps2pdf tool > I thought it would be nice to create a > document/presentation/whatever on my > Windows PC, and then generate the postscript output to a file > using the > "print to file" option on the printer driver. Then, I > transported that file > to my Linux system, and ran the ps2pdf tool on it. > Everything seemed to go > just fine, except that when I looked at the PDF file, the text looked > horrible. Only a couple of fonts seemed to look good. Then, > I printed one > of the files that didn't look very good, and the _print_ > looked just as good > as I had hoped the PDF file would look. It's nice that the > print from the > PDF looks good, but I would like the PDF file itself to look good when > viewed online. Unless you religiously use ONLY the basic Postscript fonts (Times, Helvetica, Symbol, etc), you must make sure to configure your Postscript driver to include the fonts that you use in the output file. If you don't do this, you allow font substitution to occur, which usually causes non-Adobe PS interpreters to substitute something "close" (in the same family) but with different character metrics, so your output looks rotten. Note that this makes REALLY BIG PS files. Fonts are huge. -- db
