Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 8229
PS Export by "Print to File" is no longer ghostscript friendly
Last modified: 2003-03-13 11:08:44 UTC
When I try to print a document to a file via "Print to File" feature of the OOo 643, it converts the majority of the fonts into bitmaps. If I then convert the output PS file into PDF by using ps2pdf utility of the Ghostscript, the font becomes really ugly when opened in Acrobat Reader. Now, on the same system (Mandrake 9.0), I open the same file in OOo 1.0.1 or SO 6.0, do a "Print to File" and subsequently convert the output file into PDF, the fonts are preserved and look just like they should. I've tested the following fonts: Arial Times New Roman Albany Thorndale Times Helvetica Kidprint Using 643, only Times and Helvetica fonts are preserved as fonts. All the other fonts become bitmaps when printed to file. Using 1.0.1 or SO 6.0, on the other hand, all of the above fonts are preserved in the converted PDF file (even the Kidprint font, which surprised me!). I've first noticed it on my heavily tweaked version of Mandrake 8.2. But I've also confirmed it on a near-fresh install of Mandrake 9.0. I hope this will get fixed before the official 1.1 is out, as I rely heavily on this feature in my LaTeX work. By the way, 643 looks really promising. It shows tons of improvements over the previous 1.0.x versions. I can readily see that the performance, in particular, has been much improved in both Linux and Windows versions. Thank you for your excellent work. Kohei
TM->PL: As talked to US, this one is not really a framework-issue. As he mentioned, you might know more about this behaviour, thanks !
Fonts are never printed as bitmaps. What you probably mean is that nowadays more font subsets are downloaded than before (that means parts of the fonts on your system are downloaded to the PostScript file; these are not bitmaps though); you can circumvent this by adding font substitutions to the table in Tools->Options->OpenOffice->Font substitution Add e.g. Arial -> Helvetica and the PostScript builtin font should be used again. Additonally you can add the following line to <office>/psprint/driver/SGENPRT.PPD (e.g. after the line beginning with "*LanguageLevel": *TTRasterizer: Type42 This makes the Generic Printer capable of using Type42 fonts which often results in better output with ghostscript.
Thanks Philipp for your reply. I tried your second suggestion, and guess what, it worked! As a side effect I've lost several fonts including Times, Helvetica, Albany and Thorndale (and probably more), but I'm good as long as all my TrueType fonts are available. I guess my question now is, will this behavior be permanent in the 643 branch, in other words, will I need to modify the SGENPRT.PS in all subsequent releases of this branch? or will it revert to the behavior in the previous 1.0 branch (assuming that something did change between the two branches wrt this issue)? It's not a big issue as long as I know the workaround, but still I think it's best that this issue get addressed before the 1.1 release in order to avoid surprises. Thanks, Kohei
On second inspection, all the fonts that I thought were gone just reappeared! I guess either I was hallucinating due to too much caffeine, or it simply fixed itself (don't know how). Kohei
I think there are two things we should do here: 1. One could generate a Ghostscript PPD that is essentially SGENPRT plus Type42 support (would be a good thing anyway since it would improve printing on almost all Linux systems) 2. We really lost a feature we had in 641, namely the automatic font substitution on the printer (which is by the way configurable with spadmin). I will think of a way to reactivate that with the current printing method (which changed to support CTL and Bidi layout).
AFAICT, the first solution alone will be sufficient for my specific needs. Thanks Philipp. Kohei
In CWS vcl05 there is a Type42 enabled generic printer PPD as well as a working fontsubstitution again.
Old versions of Ghostscript rasterized some of the fonts. Try this file on GS 8.00
fixed in vcl05
fixed
verified in vcl_05.
As mentioned on the qa dev list on March 5th I will close all resolved <wontfix/duplicate/worksforme/invalid> issues. Please see this posting for details.