Typophile

Dot font Opentype printing problems

pmcn

I am trying to produce a scaleable dot-based font family in Fontlab as Mac flavoured Opentype. I’ve had a lot of trouble with getting small circles to be geometrically correct in Truetype (the beziers flatten the arcs) but Opentype keeps them geometrically consistent.

However, I have a bigger problem which I can't seem to fix.

The more complex font shown here (with the six dot stroke) refuses to print as Opentype from InDesign or Acrobat on a Konica Minolta PagePro 9100 laser printer with 64Mb memory. It doesn't crash – just ignores the file and clears the print queue. I reckon that there must be too much data in each individual character at the higher dot pitch – and that I am exceeding a Postscript limit. I can't find any info on this and Fontlab tech support have been unable to help. Any ideas on solutions or workrounds would be welcome as I would like to construct a large family of scaleable dot fonts.

Another issue, which may be related, is that I have chosen to set the type height to its true size, 1008 UPM rather than 1000 UPM, so that the fonts can be accurately scaled to size. If I don't do this, the scaling maths becomes difficult to resolve as does the dot structure. Any advice on this?

Thanks,

Paul

AttachmentSize
FourTwo Test 21-111-10 -2.jpg154.89 KB
FourTwo TestB.jpg65.6 KB
blank

I assume that you’re working with components. Are you converting everything to outlines in the final fonts? I imagine that printer programmers aren’t thinking about fonts with dozens of components in the characters.

You might want to contact Christian Schwartz directly about creating dot fonts as he has done a few.

Karsten Luecke

Could be this:

In "Preferences/Options > Generating OpenType & TrueType > OpenType PS (.otf)", deactivate "Use subroutines to compress outlines in the CFF table", then generate the font again.

See Adam Twardoch's posts here.

Thomas Phinney

It might be interesting to try printing the same page on a PS printer with a lot more RAM and/or Adobe PostScript. My recollection is that the QMS clonescript used by Konica Minolta was reportedly the worst of the major PostScript clones, or at least it was a few years back.

Regards,

T

pmcn

Many thanks, all, for your help on this. I'm going to go with Adam's advice given elsewhere and abandon the fonts for now.

Captured from web.archive.org on 10 Oct 2014. view this capture