> 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_.
If you're sending it to a PS printer, then yep, most of the printer PS implementations are licensed from Adobe, so the drivers are all making the same decisions about substitution, so it works well (or at least better). Sounds like replacing the ghostscript interpreter with a newer version got you closer to the same results. I'll have to try that as well. (BTW, you don't want the driver to include bitmaps of the characters. If you use the real Adobe PS driver for Windows, there's an option to include only the characters you use of the fonts, and it puts the stroke versions in rather than the bitmaps. It produces much nicer output overall -- the Adobe PS driver is on the Acrobat CD, or I think you can download it from their WWW site. If you produce documents ultimately destined for press printers like a Linotype, the Adobe driver is a real win.)
