Blurry fonts in printed invoices
Celejar
I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
page are illegibly blurry, although the boilerplate comes out okay. I
didn't used to see this problem, but I can't say when it started. It
occurs in IW and Epiphany, using cups-pdf as well as IW's native print
to pdf or ps functionality. I don't see the problem with ordinary
webpages, just invoices, and even the latter render fine in the
browser, I just can't save them (for later printing / viewing) properly
as PDF's. The problem occurs with any invoice type page I try. Saving
the file and running html2ps seems to work. Anyone seeing this, or know
what could be wrong
Celejar
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Mumia W..
> Hi,
>
> I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
> to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
>
I haven't seen that. Could you mock-up some samples for others to test with?
Florian Kulzer
> On 07/09/2008 07:52 PM, Celejar wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
>> to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
>> page are illegibly blurry, [...]
>>
>
> I haven't seen that. Could you mock-up some samples for others to test with?
It might also be helpful to see what "pdffonts" reports for the
problematic PDFs. In addition to that, is there a difference with the
blurred fonts between display on screen and print? If the blurring is
visible on the screen as well, can you provide zoomed-in screenshots of
a good and a bad part? (assuming you can find clippings that illustrate
the problem without revealing any sensitive information)
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Florian |
Celejar
"Mumia W.." <paduille.4061....@earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 07/09/2008 07:52 PM, Celejar wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
> > to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
> > page are illegibly blurry, [...]
> >
>
> I haven't seen that. Could you mock-up some samples for others to test with?
I'll try. All the ones that are readily available contain personal
information; I'll have to either sanitize one, or find an example
without such information.
Celejar
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Celejar
"Mumia W.." <paduille.4061....@earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 07/09/2008 07:52 PM, Celejar wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
> > to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
> > page are illegibly blurry, [...]
> >
>
> I haven't seen that. Could you mock-up some samples for others to test with?
Ok, here are two cropped, sanitized versions of a Newegg invoice. This
is a screenshot of the IW display of the webpage:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/newegg-web.jpg
and this is a screenshot of a version printed with CUPS-PDF:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/newegg-pdf.jpg
I see the same problem when printing to an actual printer, to a
CUPS-PDF virtual printer, and when using IW's native print-to-file
functionality.
Is there any other information I can provide?
Celejar
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Celejar
Florian Kulzer <florian.ku...@icfo.es> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 19:59:06 -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:
> > On 07/09/2008 07:52 PM, Celejar wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
> >> to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
> >> page are illegibly blurry, [...]
> >>
> >
> > I haven't seen that. Could you mock-up some samples for others to test with?
>
> It might also be helpful to see what "pdffonts" reports for the
Some examples, all from PDFs that exhibit at least some bad fonts:
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
WQDACH+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 164 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 94 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 24 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 15 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 54 0
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
WQDACH+f-3-0 TrueType yes yes yes 142 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 36 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 21 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 47 0
RABYKY+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 183 0
UFQSLH+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 185 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 193 0
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
NJCWTD+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 10 0
RABYKY+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 8 0
KPSHBO+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 75 0
RDZRPI+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 77 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 47 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 31 0
KPSHBO+f-6-0 TrueType yes yes yes 84 0
JBEEIF+f-7-0 TrueType yes yes yes 88 0
Unfortunately, I have no idea what any of this means :/
> problematic PDFs. In addition to that, is there a difference with the
> blurred fonts between display on screen and print? If the blurring is
The problem appears even on screen.
> visible on the screen as well, can you provide zoomed-in screenshots of
> a good and a bad part? (assuming you can find clippings that illustrate
> the problem without revealing any sensitive information)
I have posted some screenshots in another message to the list, although
I have the feeling that they may not be very useful. If you can
suggest any improvements on them, I'll be glad to post more.
Thanks for your help.
> Florian |
Celejar
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Mumia W..
> [...]
> http://lizzie.freehostia.com/newegg-pdf.jpg
>
That is a mess.
> I see the same problem when printing to an actual printer, to a
> CUPS-PDF virtual printer, and when using IW's native print-to-file
> functionality.
>
> Is there any other information I can provide?
>
Let's hope the PDFfonts avenue helps. It seems that some bad font
calculations occurred, and it may be due to bad font substitutions.
Install the fonts required by the application that produces the invoice.
If that's not possible, get very close substitutions.
Also try inkscape 0.46, which can read, convert and fix some kinds of
PDF files.
Florian Kulzer
> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:06:19 +0200 Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 19:59:06 -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:
> > > On 07/09/2008 07:52 PM, Celejar wrote:
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> > >> I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
> > >> to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
> > >> page are illegibly blurry, [...]
> > >>
> > >
> > > I haven't seen that. Could you mock-up some samples for others to test with?
> >
> > It might also be helpful to see what "pdffonts" reports for the
>
> Some examples, all from PDFs that exhibit at least some bad fonts:
>
> name type emb sub uni object ID
> ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> WQDACH+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 164 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 94 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 24 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 15 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 54 0
[...]
> Unfortunately, I have no idea what any of this means :/
It would be good to know if you also see the nameless type 3 fonts
listed for PDFs that you generate from other web pages, e.g. the Debian
homepage.
> > problematic PDFs. In addition to that, is there a difference with the
> > blurred fonts between display on screen and print? If the blurring is
>
> The problem appears even on screen.
>
> > visible on the screen as well, can you provide zoomed-in screenshots of
> > a good and a bad part? (assuming you can find clippings that illustrate
> > the problem without revealing any sensitive information)
>
> I have posted some screenshots in another message to the list, although
> I have the feeling that they may not be very useful. If you can
> suggest any improvements on them, I'll be glad to post more.
Your browser screenshot seems fine to me, aside from the jpeg
compression artefacts. The PDF (evince?) screenshot confuses me a bit,
because I see two distinct problems: The personalized part is typeset in
a font that is too small and has very bad hinting, and the boilerplate
text seems to exhibit an issue with the kerning (character spacing). Can
you clarify which problem we are trying to solve right now and provide a
higher-magnification zoom (at least 400%) of a relevant part?
At the moment I suspect that some bad/unusual CSS font specifications in
the invoice web page are to blame for triggering the use of the type 3
fonts in the PDF. You could try to install the iceweasel-webdeveloper
extension; this will give you an easy way to view the CSS and disable it
fully or partially. Maybe this will be enough to make the produced PDFs
legible again. Increasing the minimum font size in the iceweasel
preferences is another quick thing to try. If that all does not help
then I would be interested in seeing the full CSS of the page, including
the "print" style (if it is defined).
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Celejar
"Mumia W.." <paduille.4061....@earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 07/10/2008 10:37 PM, Celejar wrote:
> > [...]
> > http://lizzie.freehostia.com/newegg-pdf.jpg
> >
>
> That is a mess.
>
> > I see the same problem when printing to an actual printer, to a
> > CUPS-PDF virtual printer, and when using IW's native print-to-file
> > functionality.
> >
> > Is there any other information I can provide?
> >
>
> Let's hope the PDFfonts avenue helps. It seems that some bad font
> calculations occurred, and it may be due to bad font substitutions.
I posted some pdffonts output in another message in this thread, but as
I said there, I have no idea what any of it means.
> Install the fonts required by the application that produces the invoice.
> If that's not possible, get very close substitutions.
The pages I'm printing are from websites; they aren't produced by any
application I'm running. What font packages should I have installed?
I think I have a pretty standard set, but it's possible I'm missing
something important.
> Also try inkscape 0.46, which can read, convert and fix some kinds of
> PDF files.
Thanks, I'll look into that.
Celejar
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Celejar
I do. For http://www.debian.org:
A screenshot of my browser's (IW) display of the page, at what is
apparently the maximum zoom (by pressing <CTRL>-++ until no further
change seemed forthcoming):
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/www.debian.org.jpg
A PDF created with CUPS-PDF:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/www.debian.org.pdf
A screenshot of that PDF viewed in Evince at 400%:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/www.debian.org.pdf.jpg
The pdffonts output for that PDF:
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
RRTVUI+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 9 0
PGUGBG+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 13 0
VKJNGT+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 88 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 20 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 32 0
MFZMRR+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 99 0
GMTXSU+f-7-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 103 0
RXRETH+f-6-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 101 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 115 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 108 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 112 0
> > > problematic PDFs. In addition to that, is there a difference with the
> > > blurred fonts between display on screen and print? If the blurring is
> >
> > The problem appears even on screen.
> >
> > > visible on the screen as well, can you provide zoomed-in screenshots of
> > > a good and a bad part? (assuming you can find clippings that illustrate
> > > the problem without revealing any sensitive information)
> >
> > I have posted some screenshots in another message to the list, although
> > I have the feeling that they may not be very useful. If you can
> > suggest any improvements on them, I'll be glad to post more.
>
> Your browser screenshot seems fine to me, aside from the jpeg
> compression artefacts. The PDF (evince?) screenshot confuses me a bit,
> because I see two distinct problems: The personalized part is typeset in
> a font that is too small and has very bad hinting, and the boilerplate
> text seems to exhibit an issue with the kerning (character spacing). Can
> you clarify which problem we are trying to solve right now and provide a
> higher-magnification zoom (at least 400%) of a relevant part?
The primary problem is the horribly blurry, blocky, pixellated font
that much of the newegg page is using, although I'm also concerned
about the tiny font of the personalized part. [In my original message,
I said I was concerned with the personalized part, but that was really
the case for other pages. The main problem is what appears in the
non-personalized part of the newegg page.]
On the Debian PDF screenshot, all the fonts are legible, but the ones
on the sidebar and running across the top of the page are really ugly
(blocky and pixellated).
> At the moment I suspect that some bad/unusual CSS font specifications in
> the invoice web page are to blame for triggering the use of the type 3
> fonts in the PDF. You could try to install the iceweasel-webdeveloper
> extension; this will give you an easy way to view the CSS and disable it
> fully or partially. Maybe this will be enough to make the produced PDFs
> legible again. Increasing the minimum font size in the iceweasel
> preferences is another quick thing to try. If that all does not help
> then I would be interested in seeing the full CSS of the page, including
> the "print" style (if it is defined).
I'm going to hold off on this, since insofar as it seems to occur even
with the Debian page, it seems to be something wrong with my
configuration.
Thanks very much for the help.
> Florian |
Celejar
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Florian Kulzer
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:06:50 +0200 Florian Kulzer wrote:
[...]
> > > > > On 07/09/2008 07:52 PM, Celejar wrote:
> > > > >> Hi,
> > > > >>
> > > > >> I've recently been having a great deal of trouble getting my browsers
> > > > >> to save invoices as PDF's. The fonts for the personalized part of the
> > > > >> page are illegibly blurry, [...]
[...]
> > It would be good to know if you also see the nameless type 3 fonts
> > listed for PDFs that you generate from other web pages, e.g. the Debian
> > homepage.
>
> I do. For http://www.debian.org:
[...]
> The pdffonts output for that PDF:
>
> name type emb sub uni object ID
> ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> RRTVUI+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 9 0
> PGUGBG+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 13 0
> VKJNGT+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 88 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 20 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 32 0
> MFZMRR+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 99 0
> GMTXSU+f-7-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 103 0
> RXRETH+f-6-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 101 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 115 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 108 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 112 0
Here is what I get when I print www.debian.org to a PDF with iceweasel
3.0~rc2-2 (output of pdffonts v3.00 from poppler-utils 0.8.4-1.1):
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
CairoFont-0-0 CID Type 0C yes no yes 6 0
BitstreamVeraSans CID TrueType yes no yes 9 0
ArialBold CID TrueType yes no yes 11 0
Arial CID TrueType yes no yes 12 0
DejaVuSansBold CID TrueType yes no yes 17 0
BitstreamVeraSansMono CID TrueType yes no yes 18 0
CairoFont-6-0 CID Type 0C yes no yes 73 0
KochiGothic CID TrueType yes no yes 74 0
The text that looks OK in your PDF has no CSS font specifications
associated with it, so iceweasel should render it using your configured
default font. The elements with the ugly fonts in the PDF, on the other
hand, all have this CSS declaration:
font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
Here is how my system matches these names:
$ for F in Arial Helvetica sans-serif; do fc-match $F; done
Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"
These font files come from the packages msttcorefonts, gsfonts-x11, and
ttf-bitstream-vera, respectively. Do you have these packages installed?
If not, does installing them give you nicer fonts in the PDF? If you do
not want to befoul your system with the evil runes of Redmond then you
could try installing ttf-liberation instead.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Celejar
Florian Kulzer <florian.ku...@icfo.es> wrote:
...
> Here is what I get when I print www.debian.org to a PDF with iceweasel
> 3.0~rc2-2 (output of pdffonts v3.00 from poppler-utils 0.8.4-1.1):
>
> name type emb sub uni object ID
> ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> CairoFont-0-0 CID Type 0C yes no yes 6 0
> BitstreamVeraSans CID TrueType yes no yes 9 0
> ArialBold CID TrueType yes no yes 11 0
> Arial CID TrueType yes no yes 12 0
> DejaVuSansBold CID TrueType yes no yes 17 0
> BitstreamVeraSansMono CID TrueType yes no yes 18 0
> CairoFont-6-0 CID Type 0C yes no yes 73 0
> KochiGothic CID TrueType yes no yes 74 0
I get (same IW, pdffonts 3.02 from xpdf-utils 3.02-1.3):
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
VKJNGT+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 88 0
RRTVUI+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 9 0
PGUGBG+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 13 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 20 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 32 0
GMTXSU+f-7-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 103 0
RXRETH+f-6-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 101 0
MFZMRR+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 99 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 108 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 112 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 115 0
Which is pretty much what I reported in my previous message.
> The text that looks OK in your PDF has no CSS font specifications
> associated with it, so iceweasel should render it using your configured
> default font. The elements with the ugly fonts in the PDF, on the other
> hand, all have this CSS declaration:
>
> font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
>
> Here is how my system matches these names:
>
> $ for F in Arial Helvetica sans-serif; do fc-match $F; done
> Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
> n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
> Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"
>
> These font files come from the packages msttcorefonts, gsfonts-x11, and
> ttf-bitstream-vera, respectively. Do you have these packages installed?
> If not, does installing them give you nicer fonts in the PDF? If you do
> not want to befoul your system with the evil runes of Redmond then you
> could try installing ttf-liberation instead.
I had the latter two installed, but not the MS fonts. I had actually
tried earlier to install them to see if it would help; it didn't, so I
removed them. I installed liberation, and my above pdffonts output is with
gsfonts-x11, ttf-bitstream-vera and ttf-liberation all installed. What
could be wrong?
> Florian |
Thanks,
Celejar
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Celejar
installing ttf-liberation. The problem seems to be fixed after doing
so.]
Now, with liberation added and X restarted, I get this:
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
DEDVIP+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 9 0
LRSXWR+f-3-0 TrueType yes yes yes 17 0
VKJNGT+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 20 0
WQHWKD+f-2-0 TrueType yes yes yes 15 0
PGUGBG+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 13 0
MFZMRR+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 31 0
GMTXSU+f-7-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 35 0
RXRETH+f-6-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 33 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 44 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 40 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 57 0
I have two fewer no-name fonts, but my named ones still have
meaningless names, not the nice ones you get. I also still have eleven
fonts reported, to your seven. Do you know what this is all about? [I
tried replacing xpdf-utils with poppler-utils, to get your pdffonts,
but the output is identical.]
> > The text that looks OK in your PDF has no CSS font specifications
> > associated with it, so iceweasel should render it using your configured
> > default font. The elements with the ugly fonts in the PDF, on the other
> > hand, all have this CSS declaration:
> >
> > font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
> >
> > Here is how my system matches these names:
> >
> > $ for F in Arial Helvetica sans-serif; do fc-match $F; done
> > Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
> > n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
> > Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"
> >
> > These font files come from the packages msttcorefonts, gsfonts-x11, and
> > ttf-bitstream-vera, respectively. Do you have these packages installed?
> > If not, does installing them give you nicer fonts in the PDF? If you do
> > not want to befoul your system with the evil runes of Redmond then you
> > could try installing ttf-liberation instead.
The Debian page, as well as other pages which had not been displaying
properly, now seem to be printing correctly.
Thanks very much for your help. I am still baffled, though, by several
things:
a) Should printing really be so crippled on Debian, with its emphasis
on freedom, if the MS fonts, or at least the liberation drop-ins,
aren't installed? The only package which depends on liberation is the
openoffice meta-package, which I don't have installed, although I do
have writer. Should I file a bug? Against what? And am I really the
first one to be bitten by this?
b) I don't seem to have seen this problem until fairly recently (I
believe within the last few months). I don't think I even had the MS
fonts or the liberation drop-ins installed.
c) Why is my pdffonts output so much uglier and less informative than
yours?
> > Florian |
Thanks again,
Florian Kulzer
> [Responding to my own message. I had neglected to restart X after
> installing ttf-liberation. The problem seems to be fixed after doing
> so.]
>
[...]
> Now, with liberation added and X restarted, I get this:
>
> name type emb sub uni object ID
> ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> DEDVIP+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 9 0
> LRSXWR+f-3-0 TrueType yes yes yes 17 0
> VKJNGT+f-4-0 TrueType yes yes yes 20 0
> WQHWKD+f-2-0 TrueType yes yes yes 15 0
> PGUGBG+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 13 0
> MFZMRR+f-5-0 TrueType yes yes yes 31 0
> GMTXSU+f-7-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 35 0
> RXRETH+f-6-0 Type 1C yes yes yes 33 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 44 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 40 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 57 0
>
> I have two fewer no-name fonts, but my named ones still have
> meaningless names, not the nice ones you get. I also still have eleven
> fonts reported, to your seven. Do you know what this is all about? [I
> tried replacing xpdf-utils with poppler-utils, to get your pdffonts,
> but the output is identical.]
[...]
> The Debian page, as well as other pages which had not been displaying
> properly, now seem to be printing correctly.
I am happy to hear that.
> Thanks very much for your help.
Don't mention it; this is a nice opportunity to learn more about font
management.
> I am still baffled, though, by several
> things:
>
> a) Should printing really be so crippled on Debian, with its emphasis
> on freedom, if the MS fonts, or at least the liberation drop-ins,
> aren't installed? The only package which depends on liberation is the
> openoffice meta-package, which I don't have installed, although I do
> have writer. Should I file a bug? Against what? And am I really the
> first one to be bitten by this?
You seem to be very selective when installing packages. There is nothing
wrong with that, of course, but I would suspect that many users of
"desktop" (as opposed to "server") machines just go for the metapackages
and they are maybe also more liberal in installing "recommends" and
"suggests". That could explain why the majority of users is less likely
to run into this kind of problem.
I now found a related bug (#489165) filed as "wishlist" against
fontconfig-config. I think it would be good if you added a brief
description of your problem to that bug report to give it more weight.
> b) I don't seem to have seen this problem until fairly recently (I
> believe within the last few months). I don't think I even had the MS
> fonts or the liberation drop-ins installed.
Many packages could be relevant for this problem (ghostscript, cairo,
freetype, poppler, gtk, ...), so it will probably be difficult to find
out which specific upgrade broke your configuration.
> c) Why is my pdffonts output so much uglier and less informative than
> yours?
I have the impression that the "nice" names show up for fonts that are
widely used and whose names are accepted as standard. For other PDFs I
see font names that are similar to your "ulgy" ones, e.g. LNFWNR+CMR10
(a "Computer Modern" font of Latex), CESJKL+FreeSans, or something like
FCGNJC+AdvP4C4E74. If you want to run pdffonts yourself on the PDF that
I printed from www.debian.org then you can download it here:
http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/www-debian-org.pdf
However, I don't recall ever seeing these "DEDVIP+f-0-0" kinds of names
before. Maybe you are still missing some other relatively important
font-related package. Here is list of the ones that I have installed:
http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/font-related-packages.txt
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Celejar
Florian Kulzer <florian.ku...@icfo.es> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 09:30:05 -0400, Celejar wrote:
...
> > I am still baffled, though, by several
> > things:
> >
> > a) Should printing really be so crippled on Debian, with its emphasis
> > on freedom, if the MS fonts, or at least the liberation drop-ins,
> > aren't installed? The only package which depends on liberation is the
> > openoffice meta-package, which I don't have installed, although I do
> > have writer. Should I file a bug? Against what? And am I really the
> > first one to be bitten by this?
>
> You seem to be very selective when installing packages. There is nothing
> wrong with that, of course, but I would suspect that many users of
> "desktop" (as opposed to "server") machines just go for the metapackages
> and they are maybe also more liberal in installing "recommends" and
> "suggests". That could explain why the majority of users is less likely
> to run into this kind of problem.
I do indeed disable automatic installation of recommends, and I
periodically mark packages as automatically installed, and aggressively
remove things. I'm not a script guru or linux expert, and much of my
learning about system maintenance is through playing with things like
package selection and kernel configuration options, to understand what
things are, why they are or are not necessary, and what happens if they
are removed or disabled. Sometimes (often) I find out the hard way ...
> I now found a related bug (#489165) filed as "wishlist" against
> fontconfig-config. I think it would be good if you added a brief
> description of your problem to that bug report to give it more weight.
Done.
...
> > c) Why is my pdffonts output so much uglier and less informative than
> > yours?
>
> I have the impression that the "nice" names show up for fonts that are
> widely used and whose names are accepted as standard. For other PDFs I
> see font names that are similar to your "ulgy" ones, e.g. LNFWNR+CMR10
> (a "Computer Modern" font of Latex), CESJKL+FreeSans, or something like
> FCGNJC+AdvP4C4E74. If you want to run pdffonts yourself on the PDF that
> I printed from www.debian.org then you can download it here:
> http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/www-debian-org.pdf
Running pdffonts on your PDF gives me the same list that you gave in
your previous message.
> However, I don't recall ever seeing these "DEDVIP+f-0-0" kinds of names
> before. Maybe you are still missing some other relatively important
> font-related package. Here is list of the ones that I have installed:
> http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/font-related-packages.txt
You do have many installed that I don't have. If I get a chance,
perhaps I'll try and see if installing everything you have accomplishes
anything, and if so, I suppose the next step will be a bisection, to
see which package(s) is / are the crucial one(s).
In the meantime, here's my list (generated from the same command in your
file):
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/font-related-packages.txt
> Florian |
Thanks,
Celejar
--
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Florian Kulzer
> On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:09:09 +0200 Florian Kulzer wrote:
[...]
> > However, I don't recall ever seeing these "DEDVIP+f-0-0" kinds of names
> > before. Maybe you are still missing some other relatively important
> > font-related package. Here is list of the ones that I have installed:
> > http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/font-related-packages.txt
>
> You do have many installed that I don't have. If I get a chance,
> perhaps I'll try and see if installing everything you have accomplishes
> anything, and if so, I suppose the next step will be a bisection, to
> see which package(s) is / are the crucial one(s).
> In the meantime, here's my list (generated from the same command in your
> file):
>
> http://lizzie.freehostia.com/font-related-packages.txt
I would say that you have all the really important packages, as far as I
can judge that.
I realized that the Debian homepage is maybe not the best test case, due
to the many non-latin characters that are required by the language names
at the bottom of the page. Maybe the font names will be more conclusive
if we confine our tests to latin character sets. I have now set up a
simple font sample page here:
http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/font-samples.html
If you still want to experiment with this a bit more then you can print
this page to a PDF and compare font names once again. I see these names
listed in the output of pdffonts:
BitstreamVeraSansBold
BitstreamVeraSans
BitstreamVeraSerif
URWBookmanL
Courier
NimbusSansL
URWPalladioL
NimbusRomanNo9L
AndaleMono
Arial
ArialBlack
ComicSansMS
CourierNew
Georgia
Impact
TimesNewRoman
Verdana
Webdings
I think you should get the same output for all the postscript fonts
(URWBookmanL, NimbusSansL = Helvetica, Courier, URWPalladioL = Palatino,
NimbusRomanNo9L = Times). It will be interesting to see which fonts are
used for the MS font names on your system; the ttf-liberation fonts
should at least take care of Arial, TimesNewRoman and CourierNew.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Celejar
Florian Kulzer <florian.ku...@icfo.es> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 17:46:23 -0400, Celejar wrote:
> > On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:09:09 +0200 Florian Kulzer wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > However, I don't recall ever seeing these "DEDVIP+f-0-0" kinds of names
> > > before. Maybe you are still missing some other relatively important
> > > font-related package. Here is list of the ones that I have installed:
> > > http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/celejar/font-related-packages.txt
...
Hmm, I still get unhelpful output:
$ pdffonts PDF/A_simple_test_page_for_common_fonts.pdf
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
XXCIFJ+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 10 0
QEHNHK+f-8-0 TrueType yes yes yes 40 0
UFQSLH+f-3-0 Type 1C yes yes no 14 0
ITPEVV+f-0-0 TrueType yes yes yes 8 0
PGUGBG+f-10-0 TrueType yes yes yes 44 0
VRBBWM+f-9-0 TrueType yes yes yes 42 0
HSAEUE+f-6-0 Type 1C yes yes no 32 0
VNZQXL+f-2-0 TrueType yes yes yes 12 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 22 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 39 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 31 0
> Florian |
Most of the fonts look quite good. The exceptions are Courier,
Helvetica and Times, which are once again blocky and pixellated. Here's
the PDF I created:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/A_simple_test_page_for_common_fonts.pdf
And here's a detail, viewed in Evince at 400%:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/font-page-400.jpg
Celejar
--
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Florian Kulzer
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:39:43 +0200 Florian Kulzer wrote:
[...]
> > If you still want to experiment with this a bit more then you can print
> > this page to a PDF and compare font names once again. I see these names
> > listed in the output of pdffonts:
[...]
> Hmm, I still get unhelpful output:
>
> $ pdffonts PDF/A_simple_test_page_for_common_fonts.pdf
> name type emb sub uni object ID
> ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> XXCIFJ+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 10 0
> QEHNHK+f-8-0 TrueType yes yes yes 40 0
> UFQSLH+f-3-0 Type 1C yes yes no 14 0
[...]
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 22 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 39 0
> [none] Type 3 yes no yes 31 0
>
> Most of the fonts look quite good.
Maybe we have to be satisfied with that, then. (A font by any other
name...) At least your system is smart enough to only embed the
necessary subsets; I now realized that mine bloats the PDFs with the
complete fonts.
> The exceptions are Courier,
> Helvetica and Times, which are once again blocky and pixellated.
What are your fontconfig settings? Here are mine:
# debconf-get-selections | grep fontconfig | column -t
fontconfig-config fontconfig/subpixel_rendering select Automatic
fontconfig-config fontconfig/enable_bitmaps boolean false
fontconfig-config fontconfig/hinting_type select Native
Disabling the bitmap fonts makes quite a difference for me. (Whether
that is an improvement is a matter of taste, of course; some people seem
to dislike the "fuzzier" look of antialiased and hinted fonts.) This
affects primarily the on-screen rendering; I am not sure if it also
influences the PDF printer.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Chris Bannister
> The text that looks OK in your PDF has no CSS font specifications
> associated with it, so iceweasel should render it using your configured
> default font. The elements with the ugly fonts in the PDF, on the other
> hand, all have this CSS declaration:
>
> font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
>
> Here is how my system matches these names:
>
> $ for F in Arial Helvetica sans-serif; do fc-match $F; done
> Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
> n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
> Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"
>
> These font files come from the packages msttcorefonts, gsfonts-x11, and
> ttf-bitstream-vera, respectively. Do you have these packages installed?
> If not, does installing them give you nicer fonts in the PDF? If you do
> not want to befoul your system with the evil runes of Redmond then you
> could try installing ttf-liberation instead.
Mmmm, I have:
..
NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
..
With no gsfonts-x11 installed.
--
Chris.
======
"One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned
at the stake while the votes were being counted." -- Thomas B. Reed
Florian Kulzer
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 04:00:09PM +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
[...]
> > $ for F in Arial Helvetica sans-serif; do fc-match $F; done
> > Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
> > n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
> > Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"
> >
> > These font files come from the packages msttcorefonts, gsfonts-x11, and
> > ttf-bitstream-vera, respectively.
[...]
> Mmmm, I have:
>
> ..
> NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
> ..
>
> With no gsfonts-x11 installed.
AFAIK, the standard font file for Nimbus Sans L (aka Helvetica) on
Debian is n019003l.pfb. (This file is part of the gsfonts package,
gsfonts-x11 only adds a symlink in /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/ and a
fonts.alias file to make sure the Adobe name is also matched.)
You seem to have the same font in another file, maybe user-installed or
a leftover from earlier days. What do you get with
fc-match -v "Nimbus Sans L" | grep file:
dpkg -S NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb
?
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Celejar
Florian Kulzer <florian.ku...@icfo.es> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 20:30:05 -0400, Celejar wrote:
...
> > $ pdffonts PDF/A_simple_test_page_for_common_fonts.pdf
> > name type emb sub uni object ID
> > ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> > XXCIFJ+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 10 0
> > QEHNHK+f-8-0 TrueType yes yes yes 40 0
> > UFQSLH+f-3-0 Type 1C yes yes no 14 0
>
> [...]
>
> > [none] Type 3 yes no yes 22 0
> > [none] Type 3 yes no yes 39 0
> > [none] Type 3 yes no yes 31 0
> >
> > Most of the fonts look quite good.
>
> Maybe we have to be satisfied with that, then. (A font by any other
> name...) At least your system is smart enough to only embed the
> necessary subsets; I now realized that mine bloats the PDFs with the
> complete fonts.
Can you elaborate on this? What part of the pdffonts output refers to that?
> > The exceptions are Courier,
> > Helvetica and Times, which are once again blocky and pixellated.
>
> What are your fontconfig settings? Here are mine:
>
> # debconf-get-selections | grep fontconfig | column -t
> fontconfig-config fontconfig/subpixel_rendering select Automatic
> fontconfig-config fontconfig/enable_bitmaps boolean false
> fontconfig-config fontconfig/hinting_type select Native
Mine are the same, except for enable_bitmaps, which is set to true.
Setting it to false (and restarting X) makes all the fonts on your page
look beautiful:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/font-page-no-bitmaps.jpg
[With enable_bitmaps set to true:
http://lizzie.freehostia.com/font-page-400.jpg]
> Disabling the bitmap fonts makes quite a difference for me. (Whether
> that is an improvement is a matter of taste, of course; some people seem
> to dislike the "fuzzier" look of antialiased and hinted fonts.) This
> affects primarily the on-screen rendering; I am not sure if it also
> influences the PDF printer.
> Florian |
Celejar
--
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Florian Kulzer
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:04:45 +0200 Florian Kulzer wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 20:30:05 -0400, Celejar wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > > $ pdffonts PDF/A_simple_test_page_for_common_fonts.pdf
> > > name type emb sub uni object ID
> > > ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
> > > XXCIFJ+f-1-0 TrueType yes yes yes 10 0
> > > QEHNHK+f-8-0 TrueType yes yes yes 40 0
> > > UFQSLH+f-3-0 Type 1C yes yes no 14 0
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > [none] Type 3 yes no yes 22 0
> > > [none] Type 3 yes no yes 39 0
> > > [none] Type 3 yes no yes 31 0
> > >
> > > Most of the fonts look quite good.
> >
> > Maybe we have to be satisfied with that, then. (A font by any other
> > name...) At least your system is smart enough to only embed the
> > necessary subsets; I now realized that mine bloats the PDFs with the
> > complete fonts.
>
> Can you elaborate on this? What part of the pdffonts output refers to that?
It refers to the "sub" column, which is "no" for all the fonts for me,
meaning that the full character sets have been embedded. Therefore my
printed PDF weighs in at more than 270 KB. Your system is smarter and
only embeds the font data for the characters that are actually used in
the document.
If I print the same page to postscript from iceweasel and distil that to
a PDF with ghostscript then the PDF has only the necessary subsets
embedded and it is 90 KB. I then get the same "ugly" font names in the
output of pdffonts that you have, by the way.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Chris Bannister
> You seem to have the same font in another file, maybe user-installed or
> a leftover from earlier days. What do you get with
>
> fc-match -v "Nimbus Sans L" | grep file:
root@box:~# fc-match -v "Nimbus Sans L" | grep file:
file: "/var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d/N/NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb"(s)
> dpkg -S NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb
root@box:~# dpkg -S NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb
dpkg: *NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb* not found.
This laptop started off as a Damn Small Linux install from the 50M
Business Card image. I then upgraded to Etch with some interesting
issues to resolve along the way, maybe this is one of them.
i.e.
chrisb@box:~$ ls -al | less
total 28220
drwxr-xr-x 191 chrisb staff 20480 2008-07-18 09:13 .
drwxrwsr-x 4 root staff 4096 2008-05-10 02:42 ..
Note the staff group.
--
Chris.
======
"One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned
at the stake while the votes were being counted." -- Thomas B. Reed
Celejar
Florian Kulzer <florian.ku...@icfo.es> wrote:
...
> It refers to the "sub" column, which is "no" for all the fonts for me,
> meaning that the full character sets have been embedded. Therefore my
> printed PDF weighs in at more than 270 KB. Your system is smarter and
> only embeds the font data for the characters that are actually used in
> the document.
Got it, thanks.
> If I print the same page to postscript from iceweasel and distil that to
> a PDF with ghostscript then the PDF has only the necessary subsets
> embedded and it is 90 KB. I then get the same "ugly" font names in the
> output of pdffonts that you have, by the way.
I've been printing from IW using the virtual CUPS-PDF printer. I just
tried printing to file (direct to PDF, not to ps), and I now get the
same pdffonts output that you do, nice font names but all 'no's in the
sub column. OTOH, I find that the file sizes are 10 - 20 percent
*smaller* for pages printed directly to file from IW! I have tried
three different pages: a blog post, a sales invoice and an AP news
article. Your test page, OTOH, is about 4 to 5 times *larger* when
printed directly to file. Perhaps the reason is that your page uses
relatively few characters per font, while more typical pages tend to
use much larger subsets, which limits the savings realized by only
including subsets of the fonts in the file?
For reference, www.debian.org is 133533 bytes when printed via
CUPS-PDF, and 113840 when printed directly to a file by IW.
> Florian |
Celejar
--
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Florian Kulzer
[...]
> I've been printing from IW using the virtual CUPS-PDF printer. I just
> tried printing to file (direct to PDF, not to ps), and I now get the
> same pdffonts output that you do, nice font names but all 'no's in the
> sub column.
Ah, so that is the difference: The cups-pdf virtual printer probably
uses ghostscript directly, including its "ugly" font naming scheme,
while the print-to-file function of iceweasel seems to work via
libcairo, resulting in nicer names but wasteful embedding of whole
character sets.
> OTOH, I find that the file sizes are 10 - 20 percent
> *smaller* for pages printed directly to file from IW! I have tried
> three different pages: a blog post, a sales invoice and an AP news
> article.
Hmm, maybe cups-pdf works like more a printer driver, embedding
character subsets for each page separately, which could lead to a
certain amount of wasteful overlap. I would then expect to see a
different name for the same font on different pages, though.
Another possible explanation is that libcairo uses a better compression
algorithm for the embedded font data, or that the size of the "full"
character set of a given font varies with the encoding.
> Your test page, OTOH, is about 4 to 5 times *larger* when
> printed directly to file. Perhaps the reason is that your page uses
> relatively few characters per font, while more typical pages tend to
> use much larger subsets, which limits the savings realized by only
> including subsets of the fonts in the file?
Yes, indeed, that might also explain why the print-to-file function does
not bother to figure out the minimum necessary character subset to
embed: It does not matter all that much unless somebody puts up a font
test page with many different fonts and only a few characters for each
individual font.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |