Font Corruption in FM 8.0.4?

Report · Jun 25, 2008

I am using FM 8.0.4 and have recently purchased a few Linotype Helvetica fonts, which I am using on a PC at home and a laptop at work. The resolutions are 1600x1050 PC and 1440x900 laptop, both at 32 bit color. I am printing to Adobe PDF directly from FM. The Helvetica LT font has an uneven baseline; that is, some characters extend slightly below the baseline and some slightly above the baseline. It is not the font; it was working before, and Linotype checked it to be sure. The font behavior survives in the PDF, but printing from the PDF seems OK - the font issue is magically resolved. I am at a loss to explain this, and I did not update any Nvidia drivers or make any system changes to either machine.
Ideas?

Report · Jun 25, 2008

Is the Acrobat PDF printer set as the system default printer?
And within Acrobat, do you have Use Only System Fonts activated?

And it's hard to tell from your description if you're partly or also complaining about the screen display in FM. If you are, have you changed the DisplayUsingPrinterMetrics line in maker.ini to On?

Art

Report · Jun 25, 2008

I'm not "complaining"; I'm describing a problem using the information I have. Yes of course I am saying that the screen display is bad, unless you prefer a roller coaster effect to your text.
None of these settings were messed with, and it worked without having to monkey around before. It is bad on two very different systems, both using 8.0.4. It was not bad before. I assume the screen is displaying what it is told to display. DisplayUsingPrinterMetrics line in maker.ini already is On.
Thanks for your help.

Report · Jun 25, 2008

Jack, have you tried deleting your font cache file?

There have been a number of postings by users (and confirmed by Dov Isaacs at Adobe) where the FNTCACHE.DAT file gets "trampled" (putting it politely), resulting in missing characters in PDFs -- my theory being that it could be your new Helvetica fonts are somehow "sharing" old Helvetica entries in the cache and therefore not resting comfortably on the real baseline.

There are several threads here on the forum and on the FrameUsers list that talk about how to delete the font cache and that it's a completely benign step. Here's an old one from FrameUsers that talks about Vista but Dov confirms that the same thing can be done with XP: http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/2007-February/006362.html

Please do let us know how you get on with troubleshooting --

Sheila

Report · Jun 25, 2008

One other thing -- do you have a previous version of Helvetica on your system? If so, it could be conflicting with the new LT one. Having duplicate fonts, even ones differing in format (TT vs. PS vs OT) has been the culprit in other font-related problems. Sometimes the issue seems to be related to the font's internal name(s) too, so it's not just an issue of the Windows-visible font filename, there are additional internal names that are variously important.

Had you previously used any Helvetica fonts at all, especially one that was a printer-resident version of Helvetica? I've experienced situations where if a printer-resident font was used in the doc but then it was saved and eventually opened when a different printer was set as the default, and even though I had the "real" font installed on my system, the font display would get clobbered. I always ended up removing the font from my system, rebooting, then reinstalling the font and making sure that Distiller knows the location of the font.

Report · Jun 25, 2008

I tried deleting the font cache, and I normally delete my temp files in %temp%. Before that, however, I had a crash: Internal Error: 8004, 6345644, 8487696, 0, which I will look up. I have several Helveticas, but they are all Linotype licensed files and should not conflict with each other (bought within the past two weeks). I will do some experimenting.
Thanks for the kind advice.

Report · Jun 26, 2008

If you purchased from the Linotype www site, try downloading from it a second time.
One time when I purchased online from the Linotype store something went wrong with the transfer and one or two of the font files were corrupted.

Art

Report · Jun 26, 2008

Jack, this is a bit of a longshot, but I just came across this on the Microtype site; does your text end up looking similar to this example?

http://www.microtype.com/Hmmms.html#0612