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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Generating PDF's in kword: font problems
From:       Lars Knoll <lars () trolltech ! com>
Date:       2003-02-05 10:57:38
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> On Monday 27 January 2003 13:31, Unai Garro wrote:
> |  Yes, I tried them, but as I said, the fonts are embedded in bitmap
> | format (Type 3) anyway, so the quality is not really good. I tried to
> | increase the resolution of the fonts to 2400dpi and this improves a bit
> | the result, but the difference with Type1 fonts is immense.

Type3 is not a bitmap format. It is an outline format. The only thing missing 
compared to type1 is the hinting. The difference might be rather due to the 
fact that a lot fot he TTFs are made for screen display and not printing 
(they usually look too wide when printed).

> |  As far as you don't use ttf fonts there's no problem. You can easily use
> |  fonts such as "Times" (Type1), but not "Times New Roman" or "Verdana" or
> |  "Arial",... etc which are ttf.

Because Qt's postscript engine takes a huge effort to generate postscript that 
degrades nicely. If you use Type 1 they are embedded. If you use bitmap fonts 
on screen, Qt creates postscript that tries to find a best fit font from the 
postscript interpreter you have (so we do some rather ugly hacks in 
postscript).

> I have somewhere Type1 variants of Arial and Times New Roman (made by me,
> for *testing purposes*), I can send you those in private mail.
>
> IMO, Type1 fonts suit much better current KDE/Linux printing model
> (GhostScript, etc.). Better avoid using TrueType fonts.

Sorry, but that's mostly wrong. The only difference when embedding the fonts 
is that you do not get hinting when embedding true type. On high resolution 
printers as we have today this doesn't matter at all. On screen true type 
fonts are a lot better and a lot faster to load for freetype (and thus Xft). 
Alltogether I'd prefer true type over type1.

> Good alternative to Type1 fonts are OpenType fonts (.otf), but unfotunately
> Qt-3.1 can't embed those fonts in generated PS/PDF files.
> They are rendered fine on screen, though.

It can actually embed most open type fonts. Only the ones based on the 
postscript font format (CFF) are not embeddable at the moment. There are very 
few of these and almost all otf fonts I know of are true type based.

> |  So far I can oly think of two solutions:
> |
> |  1) Add a printer menu: "Convert all fonts to Type1", with a list of
> | fonts that more or less accurately replace those fonts.

What for? TTFs converted to type1 will not look better when printing. The 
generated postscript will probably be 10 times as big, as we can only embed a 
complete type 1 font as opposed to only embedding the glyphs we need as we do 
with TTF.

Honestly, I do not understand your problems with TTFs. There is more 
information embedded in the font than with type1 making them look better on 
average (apart from crappy home made TTFs). The format is more compact and a 
lot faster and easier to use. Type 1 for example is mostly base64 encoded, so 
you will need to decode that and store the information in memory before you 
can use the font making them more memory hungry and slower.

Lars


> BTW: you can do that with PfaEdit
>
> |  2) Indicate in the font selection combo if the fonts are ttf or type1
> | (or whatever else)
>
> Or you can install Type1 fonts only.
>
> |  > Did you try to play with the "Driver Settings"  tab in the printer
> |  > properties dialog for the pseudo printer write-to-PDF? There, you
> |  > can tune some options concerning fonts when converting PS to PDF,
> |  > like the PDF font embedding or font resolution.

 
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