Problems when printing symbol fonts (qt-related)

[Dr. Juergen Pfennig]

Hello everybody,
before you are going to tell me that the topic is off-list please continue 
reading - I will be brief ...

KDE relies on qt for printing and lots of apps like KWord use KDE for 
printing. QT attempts to create PostScript but the code in QT 3.1.x has a 
number of shortcomings. In fact QT fails to make KWord (taken as an example) 
to print Wingdings.  As KDE currently begins to conquer the (commercial) 
Desktops more and more users will try to print (business-) documents that may 
contain symbol fonts. Imagine the following header in Bayernkurier (a 
Bavarian Newpaper read by very conservative people):

    Chaos in Münchner Stadtverwaltung - Linux druckt falsch!

(sorry for the English-only speaking folks, but be happy that you don't have 
to worry about Bayernkurier).

OK, and this is where I need help. I checked the QT code (qpsprinter.cpp and 
friends) of QT 3.1.x and found some problems. When I compare QT 3.1.x with QT 
3.2 beta2 I see some changes (improvements I hope). I would like to compile 
the QT beta code (with debug support turned on) and test it with a KDE app. 
Is it possible to do this for KDE 3.1.2 (I do not like to compile KDE 3.2)? 
Do I need to apply any patches to the QT source? Sorry, but without these 
tests a bug report to Trolltech makes little sense.

Here are some of the problems I found:

1. A current KDE installation cannot print Symbol fonts (but OpenOffice can)
2. If QT font embedding is turned off, gs crashes (maybe qt produces invalid 
ps). By the way: when gs crashes the user gets no error message (and no 
printout).
3. If QT font embedding is on the wingding chars are not embedded at all.
4. QT does not support a remote FontServer (which would be nice in a 
commercial environment).

Yours Jürgen