Bug Report - Correct Font Creation, Incorrect Character Transposition (Type 1)

[Old Faithful]

Hi there,

First post - just discovered this a few days ago and gave it a try. It seems to work well with standard windows fonts, but a get a strange font error when using a Type 1 font.

I have included a small document here that shows this weird behaviour very well.

If you look at the document, you will notice all letters are transposed by one character down in alphabetical order (i.e, a becomes b, so the word "This text" becomes "Uijt!ufyu!". Also, character spacing (kerning) is all wrong, with some letters overlapping each other...

On a larger document with the same fonts, I also get the error message:

"Error happened to Foxit PDF Creator. Your PDF Document might not be complete.

Error tag = "Drv TextOut"

Please report this error to Foxit (support@foxitsoftware.com). Thanks!"

I was wondering if anyone else had seen this bug before. Foxit works great otherwise, but I need to be able to use this font, it's my main font.

I have tried different settings in the Foxit Printer Driver properties page to no avail. I have no problem with Adobe Acrobat, but am willing to wait for a fix so as to be able to wean myself from that dreadful Adobe bloatware.

Thanks for looking into it.

[christina]

Thanks. Normally Creator allows to embed type 1 fonts. I will let our developers look into this issue. Could you please provide us a font for testing?

[Old Faithful]

I have looked into the matter and have tried with a few other type 1 fonts on my machine and all, except for one, behave in the same manner. There appears to be no correlation between type foundry and error occurence. What is remarkable is that all of these fonts behave in the exact same manner (one letter transposition down the alphabetical order). I therefore believe this is not a font problem, but rather a problem with how Foxit handles these Type 1 fonts.

In any case, I have found a work around. As you can see in the attached document, I converted the type 1 font I use into TrueType and it works just fine. A bit of a klutz, but it works ;)

The fonts used in this test can be found at this address: http://web.archive.org/web/20030107072534/www.deptan.go.id/CAQ/psfonts/. I hope this helps to resolve the issue. Foxit hold great promise, I managed after conversion to get a complex doument to render just as well as with Adobe Acrobat, in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the file size.

Keep up the good work, hope you resolve this issue soon, and that you can enable document security. I cant wait to ditch Adobe Acrobat altogether :)

[christina]

Thanks so much Old Faithful!

I have reported this issue to our development for processing.
Reported Mantis ID:0008795

Thanks again.

[Old Faithful]

Thank You, Christina!

I'll be checking from time to time for updates and hope it can be resolved. Yours is the best alternative to Adobe Acrobat I have found, not only for small footprint, but more importantly, for speed of operation and small file size.

In the mean time I'll keep testing it and report if I find other issues.

Keep up the good work!!!

[christina]

:1_01: highly appreciated!

[Old Faithful]

I have tested different Type 1 conversions combinations over the past couple of days and have come to the conclusion that the best workaround is to stick to TrueType fonts or convert any troublesome Type 1 font into TTF.

I believe the problem lies in the Type 1 specification and/or how the font is created or converted. It should come as no surprise, since Adobe, the creator of Acrobat, also created the Type 1 font specifications. The fonts in question don't cause any problems when using Adobe Acrobat.

I have sent several test PDFs, with their source DOCs and the fonts in question to your support desk.

Hope it helps solve this bug!

[christina]

Thanks a bunch Old Faithful !