Fontsproblem when printing under Linux + Windows

[Mark Hofmann <ma...@mark-hofmann.de>]

Hi all,
this is probably a little bit off topic, but I'm not sure where else I could 
ask ....

We are using fop to both create PDF files and to print directly to the 
printer. 
PDF always looks fine, but the output that we get from the printer differs 
between Linux and Windows. On Linux everything looks fine, but on Windows the 
output gets sometimes screwd up.
What happens is that some characters get printed too close to each other and 
sometimes they get printed on top of each other! Thats probably because the 
letter a slightly larger on the Windows version.
I took a look at the Postscript files that I get when I use the print dialog 
to print to a file. The files differ greatly in size. The Windows version was 
about 13 KB and the Linux version about 680 KB!
It seems that Linux embeds the fonts into the postscript and Windows does not.

Now my question is: Is there a way to work around that behavior? Is there any 
way to tell the java printing system to use the fonts it gets from fop?

Any help is greatly apprecited!

TIA

Mark

Re: Fontsproblem when printing under Linux + Windows

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@greenmail.ch>]

There are quite a few places where things can go wrong when when using
the PDF renderer:
- If you have SVG in your files and Batik renderes the SVG text you have
  a dependency on AWT which can be a cause of differences in the
  resulting PDF file.
- The printed result can differ if you're using a different PDF viewer
  (Acrobat Reader 4 or 5, GhostScript etc.). These viewers use a
  platform specific way of printing.
- Printer drivers don't all produce the same output.
- Settings on PDF viewers and printer drivers can influence the
  appearance of a document.
- Often the fonts installed differ (Truetype vs. Type 1 etc.)

When printing directly from FOP AWT is involved. AWT is known to be the
cause of differences between platforms. If you can't live with the
differences you should probably not use the AWT renderer for now. Maybe
it can be improved, but that may involve introducing platform specific
code. It may even be impossible to generate the same output using AWT on
different platforms. Some of my above points apply here as well.

We run our software on Windows, Linux and Solaris. We avoid this kind of
problem by generating PDF and converting the PDF to PostScript on Linux
and Solaris using the command line argument -toPostScript from Acrobat
Reader 4.05. The resulting PostScript file is then printed on a printer
using the LPR protocol. We're looking forward to using the PostScript
renderer directly but I need to invest some time in this renderer before
I dare to use it productively.

Maybe you could also use GhostScript to generate the PostScript (or
something else) from the PDF. The output should be the same on Win and
Linux.

Good luck!

On 30.08.2002 12:21:29 Mark Hofmann wrote:
> Hi all,
> this is probably a little bit off topic, but I'm not sure where else I could 
> ask ....
> 
> We are using fop to both create PDF files and to print directly to the 
> printer. 
> PDF always looks fine, but the output that we get from the printer differs 
> between Linux and Windows. On Linux everything looks fine, but on Windows the 
> output gets sometimes screwd up.
> What happens is that some characters get printed too close to each other and 
> sometimes they get printed on top of each other! Thats probably because the 
> letter a slightly larger on the Windows version.
> I took a look at the Postscript files that I get when I use the print dialog 
> to print to a file. The files differ greatly in size. The Windows version was 
> about 13 KB and the Linux version about 680 KB!
> It seems that Linux embeds the fonts into the postscript and Windows does not.
> 
> Now my question is: Is there a way to work around that behavior? Is there any 
> way to tell the java printing system to use the fonts it gets from fop?
> 
> Any help is greatly apprecited!
> 
> TIA
> 
> Mark



Jeremias Maerki