Re: Font metrics strangeness

[bbennett]

"Valeriy E. Ushakov" <address@hidden> replied:

>Hmm, Acrobat Reader ships with only Times, Helvetica, Courier, Symbol,
>ZapfDingbats Type1 fonts and AdobeSansMM and AdobeSerifMM Multiple
>Master fonts.  No Palatino.  May be this is the problem.

Oops! It is, partly. The other part is largely my inattention.

If I print a hard copy of Lout's PostScript output (with @InitialFont {
Palatino Base 14p }) after sending the Palatino Type 1 fonts to my
printer -- hey presto! -- the results are perfectly normal.

>As for bad FontBBox - it's strange.  Lout uses this information to
>produce PostScript or PDF.  But it doesn't emit anything about font
>metrics.

I'm without clue. Acrobat apparently complains about "bad BBox" for any
of the Lout fonts for which it must use a "multiple master" substitute.
It does this with Palatino even when it's using the Palatino Type 1
fonts! (Maybe it does this with any font it doesn't ship with?)

>PS: I've got Palatino only in Sun's f3b format shipped with my Solaris
>boxen, so I can't test it with GhostView/Acrobat.

When I allow Acrobat to use, e.g., Palatino Roman instead of the Adobe
MM sustitutes, the letterspacing is considerably improved as you
suggest (this is in fact the improvement I'd thought was due to
updating Lout's AFM file). But for some reason it still looks much
clumsier than Times, no matter how Adobe Type Manager's letterspacing
preferences are configured.

The gradation

        Acrobat displaying Times text - acceptable

        Acrobat displaying Palatino text w. Palatino font - poor

        Acrobat displaying Patatino text w. Adobe MM font - hideous

has allowed me to get myself into a muddle, sorry. The moral may be (1)
if you want PDF files to look their best, use only fonts that come with
Acrobat, (2) the way Acrobat displays your PDF, even using the
appropriate Type 1 fonts, may have surprisingly little to do with the
appearance of a printed PostScript version from the same Lout source.

Regards,

-- Bruce Bennett