Font kerning (character-to -character spacing) when printing problem

[Mark Thorp Duxbury]

On Friday 26 March 2004 00:41, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Dik Takken wrote:
>
> I'm afraid that the problem is with Qt's embedding of the fonts.
>
> I don't embed fonts, but that isn't very simple.  Especially if you use
> CUPS.
>
> --
> JRT

Greetings,

Now I understand what's happened.  

I vaguely remember (probably several years ago now) working with ghostscript 
to get font names to match what qt was  producing.  I seem to remember making 
a whole set of aliases by printing samples from a kde app over and over again 
with different fonts and then looking to see what qt called those fonts and 
trying to find what ghostscript was calling them.  I remember this process as 
being quite horrible.  [If I may be permitted a brief, possibly incorrect, 
and definitely on the wrong list, rant: Why, in God's name, can't ghostscript 
tell you what fonts it knows about?  For example, why isn't there something 
like "gs --print_sample_fonts > test.ps" which would cause ghostscript to 
print a sample of every font it knows about, along with the names that 
ghostscript knows for each font.  Sorry for that, I feel better now.]

Anyway, I guess that at some point the qt default switched to embedded fonts 
and that's when I started having problems with poor print quality.  I just 
turned off font embedding in qt (use qtconfig from the command line and look 
on the printer tab).  I can't say whether the font names qt produces match 
what ghostscript might know about on any given system (I still have the old 
aliases I made lying around on mine) - at the very least ghostscript will 
have to know about your TrueType fonts (I think ttmkfdir is involved but I 
don't remember for sure)  At any rate, printing from qt (and thus kde) apps 
here is now fine with embedding turned off.

I really hope that Trolltech makes fixing this problem a priority, as in 
environments such as mine, quality text printing is absolutely essential, and 
a problem like this literally - if this workaround didn't work - would 
prevent us from using kde... And using unembedded fonts is really hard 
(ghostscript's documentation is not much help).  Don't get me wrong - I love 
qt, it's by far my favorite toolkit, this just seems like a pretty big 
problem right now.

Much thanks to everyone who suggested solutions, I'd have never figured this 
out on my own.  Oh and sorry for the rant above.

Mark
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