Problems when printing symbol fonts (qt-related)

[Dr. Juergen Pfennig]

Hello Michael,
in the meantime I managed to test with qt 3.2 and luckily it works much 
better. There are new bugs and I have sent a bug-report to TT.

> > 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).
>
> I hope that with cups-1.2, print notification will be much better.
> For the moment, you should be able to see the job status in the
> job viewer.

That's good news too!

(I added the text of the TT-bug-report below)
Jürgen

------------------------------ BUG Report for TT ----------------------------
I have a show-stopper concerning QT 3.1.2 (and earlier) and QT 3.2 Beta 2.

Szenario: I am currently designing a commercial server application which will 
contain non-GPL qt only code. The qt only thing will need to print. Admin 
Users will use VNC to remote access a stripped down KDE desktop from Windows 
PCs.

Current status (qt 3.1.2) - will there be a fix?:

- qt's font embedding does not work at all for symbol fonts (in the font table 
all entries are set to /.notdef)

Status with qt 3.2 beta 2:

- embedding of symbol fonts now works but only if "xft support" is enabled. 
Whe xtf is off the generated ps shows strange characters. A screen-shot is 
attached to this mail (generated from qt's textedit example).

Common problems (qt 3.1.x and 3.2):

- the code in qpsprinter.cpp does not support a remote X-Fontserver. But this 
feature is important for commercial apps.

- qt reads the fonts.dir file but does not correctly handle the XFree 4.3 
format, which can look like:
   ds=y:ai=0.15:xxx.ttf -b&h-xxx-bold-i-xxx--0-0-0-0-c-0-iso8859-15

You probably are aware of compatibility problems ...

qt3.1.x does not render correctly with the X-Server "Load freetype" 
(XFConfig86) extension. When running with KDE 3.1.x one needs to use "Load 
xtt" for correct rendering. On the other hand this seems to disable "xft 
support". If this does not get fixed even a KDE 3.2 app with QT 3.2 would not 
be able to print symbol fonts.

The PS script code that is generated by QT 3.1 and QT 3.2 without font 
embedding crashes kghostscript (when gs is configured to load ttf files). But 
the same output will correctly display in gv.