[cl-typesetting-devel] cl-typesetting at work!

[Klaus Weidner]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:13:06AM -0800, Peter Seibel wrote:
> Hmmm. I noticed that to so I printed it, hoping that would clear
> things up. No dice. Of course I have no idea how printing really
> works; I'm using CUPS on a GNU/Linux box printing to a hp LaserJet
> 2200d--for all I know the same code is being used to convert from PDF
> to Postscript as xpdf uses to render. Marc, can you give a 30 second
> overview of how fonts work in cl-pdf, cl-typesetting, or PDF
> generally? For instance, is all the font data embedded in a PDF
> document? If so where does it come from? If not, how are the fonts
> supposed to be found when it is rendered on a different machine?

As Marc explained in his message, it's caused by the condensed printing
being done using a rescaling of the existing fonts, using a PDF geometric
transformation when drawing the strings.

I'm not sure how CUPS prints on your system - on my Debian box, I have
"pdftops" which uses the xpdf code, and "pdf2ps" which uses GhostScript.
Ghostscript and acroread handle the condensed font correctly, xpdf
doesn't. So depending on which one of those CUPS uses, you'll get
different results.

-Klaus