Saturday, May 12, 2007

Postscript looking manky?

Since I got my nice new cheapo network laser printer set up in Linux and Windows, I've noticed a problem when printing some Postscript documents from Linux. The pages will look fine on screen, but some fonts won't be sent to the printer (or something) and it will use a proportional font (e.g. Helvetica)'s character spacing with Courier instead, a fixed font, which results in totally uneven and sometimes overlapping characters horizontally. I read somewhere that Ghostscript has much more fonts than Postscript, so perhaps not all the font data is being sent to the printer and this is the problem.

I scratched my head for a while, trying different viewers and the like, but eventually stumbled, completely accidentally on a fix which works for me, although results in massive bloat:

Run ps2ps on the postscript file. This is supposed to 'optimise' the postscript file somehow, but so far has resulted in them increasing in size for me, and looking weird on screen... however, the printer output is absolutely spot on. It just seems to convert everything into image data... which is a lame fix, but suits me for printing.

I'd appreciate it if anyone else knows more about this and maybe a better solution!

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