PCL soft font problem 2

[sb9]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding PCL soft fonts. We are developers of an application, that prints to PCL5 printers directly, i.e. without using the printer driver. This application is also using PCL soft fonts. Most soft fonts have been converted from TTF.

While this generally works fine for years, we are currently having a problem with a new PCL soft font. This special soft font is an Open Type font. We converted it to PCL in the same way as the TTF fonts before. The font works fine on two PCL printers (HP 2055, Lexmark 610). Unfortunatly it prints no spaces on two other printers (HP 4250, HP 4515), which makes the font unusable for us. Any other character seems to be ok, only the space is missing.

I looked into the font file with a hex editor, and it looks fine at the point where the blank is defined (i.e. it contains <ESC>*c32E<ESC>(s10W... ).

Does anyone have an idea why the font prints no blanks on several printers while it does on others?



Best regards,



Stefan

 

[DansDadUK]

Stefan

>> ... I don't know if it displayed the pitch width of 0 ...

Assuming that you selected the option to 'interpret font header data', the 'Master Design: Space Width" value IS shown for PCLETTO fonts - but only if the value is non-zero!

When I get time, I'll make a change to the 'PRN File Analyse' tool to generate a comment if the value is zero.

Chris

 

[DansDadUK]

New version (2.2.0.0) of PCL Paraphernalia application is available (via

http://www.pclparaphernalia.eu

); changes include:

- When analysing soft font headers, output a comment if the Pitch value in the header is zero.

- New tool (Soft Font Generate): generates a downloadable PCLETTO or PCLXLETTO soft font from a donor TrueType font (provided that the fsType flags don't include 'Restricted license embedding', or 'No subsetting' or 'Bitmap embedding only').

The generated font will be bound to a selected symbol set, chosen from a small set of mapped symbol sets.