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S
shoose
Known Participant
August 20, 2013
Question

What is the difference between "Save as PDF" and printing to "Adobe PDF."

  • August 20, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 1327 views

Hi all,

FrameMaker 11, Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard.

We are getting different behavior if we do "save as PDF" as opposed to doing "Print" and choosing "Adobe PDF" as the printer.  In the former, italicized math symbols do not come out italicized, while they do using the latter.  I don't know if it matters, but we are using Lucida Sans Unicode to create the Math symbols, and then just applying an Italic char style to make them slant.

So within the guts of Frame somewhere, it is calling something different for each of those selections. Does anyone know what, or how to find out?  Is this documented somewhere? It is quite unclear how Frame and Acrobat interface, i.e. is this a setting in Frame or Acrobat?

Thanks for any help,

Shelley Hoose

Sr Doc Developer

Rogue Wave Software

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Arnis Gubins
    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    August 20, 2013

    Shelly,

    Are you using the CMYK or RGB option for the SaveAs PDF route? These supply different postscript headers and some fonts (OTF Pro; WGL-4 TTF fonts) have been known to misbehave using the CMYK option (especially when they are misused).

    Printing to the PDF printer instance is almost the same as choosing the SaveAsPDF RGB route, minus details about generating Acrobat data, applying crop boxes and some post-processing of the postscript for optimization.

    The Lucida Sans Unicode does not have an Italics component, so you are forcing Distiller to synthesize this by applying an oblique angle to the font, if it receives sufficient information on what and how to do it.

    I would suggest first trying to find a more appropriate font that includes true italics for typesetting math.

    Matt-Tech Comm Tools
    Community Expert
    Matt-Tech Comm ToolsCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 20, 2013

    I'm sure Arnis is correct as usual with the first part, but I believe it could obscure the second part of his answer: Don't apply italics to a font that doesn't have an Italic version.

    More broadly, don't apply any version of a font in any application if no such version is defined in the font.

    While some software will attempt to "fake" the font, the attempt is usually crude compared to the designed version.

    And just to get the type maniacs going...a sans font will generally have an obliqued (slanted, as Arnis points out above) version, rather than an italicized version, where the letterforms can differ significantly from the regular version.

    Bottom line: Do as Arnis suggests, and choose a math font with italics.

    -Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant
    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 21, 2013

    > While some software will attempt to "fake" the font, the attempt is usually crude compared to the designed version.

    And on Windows, Frame won't even attempt to fake unless the currently configured printer is using a PostScript (or PDF) driver. I'm guessing that these sorts of not-really-in-the-font transforms are PostScript capabilities.

    If you have, for example, a PCL printer configured, you'll get a font error.

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