At 09:29 AM 9/29/06 +0200, dc wrote: >I've never had any problems with the TT fonts, but I've had all sorts of >difficulties when I need to use the PS fonts. I've just been told by a >publisher: "Commercial publishers abandoned TrueType fonts a long time ago >because they produce unreliable results with commercial printers. These >problems with positioning are aggravated with graphic applications such as >music engraving. Microsoft has finally tacitly recognized this fact with >their push toward the implementation of OpenType fonts." >Anyone care to comment on this or share any experience?
I've designed several books and many graphical 'objects' for commercial publication that used only TrueType fonts or mixed fonts, with no problems from major commercial printers. However, there are printers who invested heavily in Mac equipment in the early desktop days, when there was nothing else to be had. To this day, some of them remain unable to cope with Things Windows, including documents with TrueType fonts -- an issue of inexperience, I think, as well as printers being notorious in their passionate hatred of change. (I worked in an offset/letterpress print shop, and was also a museum poster/exhibit designer.) I've had to deal with a few problematic printers when creating posters and program booklets. They really weren't able to explain why their Mac publishing system didn't work while other printers had no trouble, so they lost a customer. For example, in 2001 on a tight deadline I got a great bid to print a poster from one of the state's older shops that did many newspapers as well as ordinary commercial printing. They were so weighed down by their technology that I quite literally had to drive 60 miles back home and make Type 1 font versions (using ttf2pt1) because their machines wouldn't even recognize PDFs with embedded TrueType. We got through the poster, but I pulled the 80-page program book and brought it to a younger printing company (still Mac-based), who did a flawless job. It recently happened again. I'd sent PDF newsletters for five years without problems. This time, though, the one secretary who brings her own Mac to work ran the newsletter. Despite all the TrueType fonts being embedded in a PDF, the Mac system replaced (only) the embedded Times New Roman font with its own Times font, including Mac encoding (curly quotes being replaced with small numbers, for example). I don't understand the reasons for not respecting the embedded fonts in a PDF, but the two Times-family fonts are different enough to seriously affect placement. (You can see this in Finale if you mix the text fonts. Spacing is quite different in texts set in Times New Roman vs. Times, both on screen and on the page.) For proper spacing, it seems to help to print to a Postscript file using the Adobe profile for the actual printer that will be used to print the document, and then distill the PDFs. I never take a chance with books, where page spacing can sometimes shift just enough to move words from one page to another, changing the flow of an entire chapter -- deadly for design and indexing. So I always install the printer profiles on my computer prior to doing a job (ECRM Mako, Marlin, Stingray, Knockout, and VR Series, Xerox InfoPrint 4000 and Color 70, various Konica, etc., are all installed) in order to print the Postscript to file using the exact target printer. How much of this is voodoo, I don't know. But I've learned that printers are pretty surly and will come up with every bogus reason that it's my fault they are having trouble printing a publication ... until, of course, a competitor does it flawlessly. (The other) Dennis -- Please participate in my latest project: http://maltedmedia.com/waam/ My blog: http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
