What happens if you print from a PDF?

T

Your description reminds me of a very old conflict (pre-OS X) that we used to have between Minion and Meta. We ended up re-buying Meta, and putting it in a folder labelled “for use with Minion.” Surely a ghost that old still isn’t lurking around? Unfortunately, we never did get to the bottom of the problem— only to our work-around.

Thomas, “B”:

Sorry—I’d given up on the thread!

“B”: I’m not using the fonts together; this happens with them being used separately.

Thomas: Doesn’t seem to matter.

The effect is subtle but noticeable, and a little experimentation shows the same thing is happening with a number of my serif fonts (although it may be happening with the sans-serifs, too, and it’s just not as noticeable). Not so much in TNR or the Garamond that ships with OS X, though.

Is this perhaps a printer issue? The HP 1300 series is not native PS, and I don’t even know how to make the 1300 emulate PS in OS X. Is my equipment the bottleneck?

OK, some more experimentation: I am finding this effect in Word, too, and with every serif font I have tried (including that old standby, TNR). I would more closely describe the effect this way: that the system seems to want to place the very bottom of every character directly onto the baseline. On screen, everything look great; in print, things are jumbly. As I said, the effect is subtle but noticeable (and more so in fonts like Scala).

Yeesh. Can anyone suggest a test that would help me narrow down the problem? Maybe print a .pdf for me on their equipment to see if the effect really is local to my hardware?

It’s the printer. You’re already getting their PostScript emulation, I imagine. Sorry for not picking up on the problem right away.

Another type designer wrote me about this quite a while ago, and he eventually figured out that at least certain versions of the HP clonescript misinterpret hinting blue zones, causing them to suppress overshoots at far too large a ppem size. That causes exactly the phenomenon you describe, with both Type 1 fonts and OpenType CFF fonts.

You can always try contacting HP and seeing if they have a ROM update or something.

(Or buy an Adobe PostScript device.)

Regards,

T

Thomas:

Thanks for getting back. I took the printer to work (where I’m stuck with a PC) and found the same thing happening, so I was reaching the same conclusion as you: either the printer, or the driver (which for a non-hacker like me amounts to the same thing). I’ve had this printer for about 2 years; leave it to the neophyte to take that long to notice the problem at more than a subconscious level (getting the feeling that my output quality was not up to snuff).

I did see that the problem appeared to go away, or had less impact on the appearance of the type, at larger point sizes (14 to 16pt and up, rather than 10 to 12pt and smaller). This would be in line with the diagnosis you’re suggesting, no? It’s a pity that HP wouldn’t have tried to deal with this in their 10.4 driver updates (or would that have been Apple’s responsibility?).

I’ll give both your suggestions a try—HP now, a new printer after the holidays, bank account and the economy willing.