[PyKDE] Print Quality

[David Boddie]

On Saturday 24 June 2006 21:47, Jose David wrote:
> David Boddie escreveu:

> > Have you tried some of the Qt or PyQt examples and demos that deal with
> > printing? Do they also suffer from the same problem?
>
> Yes i did, and yes it's the same :(

I can't remember whether Qt 3's configuration options include special ones
for fonts. I assume for now that Qt can find all the fonts it needs. It seems
to be able to display all the ones I can select using the print dialog.

> > I guess it could be a font setup issue. Can you post some code that shows
> > the problem?
>
> Sure, just point to http://www.jotux.org/code/ and you will find a
> printer test dialog and some pdf printed in my system.

OK. I got that working without any problems. I'm guessing that some font
information has been embedded in the files because test2.pdf and test3.pdf
are both twice as large as test1.pdf. These larger files are also the ones
that show the font problems. Having said that, some files I generated are
large because they have Type 1 fonts embedded in them, I think.

> The pdfs where printed to a cups-pdf printer, which is giving the
> exact same output as the normal printers i have, a Minolta 1300w and a
> Epson stylus cx3650.
>
> I whas fooled, the font that prints fine its the Nimbus Sans L , i
> whas specifying Helvetica but as the name of the one i have its
> diferent it whas falling back to Nimbus.
>
> With the printer_tests.py you can see the one you choosed and the font
> that the painter uses in the printer.

When I tried printing, I found that text displayed using TrueType and Type 1
fonts looked OK when the files were previewed in KGhostView. When PCF fonts
were used, the resulting Postscript files actually appeared to use another
substituted font.

> Thanks for the reply, as anyone had this problem or its just me??
> The problem seems to bee in all versions of Debian, stable testing and
> unstable.
>
> If you have other systems and can try i will apreciate.

I tried with Kubuntu (based on Ubuntu 5.04). It looks like some fonts can be
embedded into the Postscript files and others can't. I suspect that all Type
1 and TrueType fonts should work fine, but that the PCF ones can be
problematic.

I tried printing using Skencil (a Tkinter-based drawing application which
does a lot of its own font handling) and I could get decent Postscript output
both with and without font embedding enabled. However, I think Skencil knows
the location of some fonts used by Ghostscript, so perhaps it can use this
to create more acceptable Postscript files.

Sorry I can't prescribe a solution for this. I'll keep looking to see if I
can find more answers.

David