Re: ps-print question

[David Penton]

On 2011-01-02, at 7:22 PM, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> 
> Am 02.01.2011 um 22:20 schrieb David Penton:
> 
>> (This is in `Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Roman)
> 
> 
> Yeah – this is OK, except that the font is not "Roman". The ` character 
> becomes

Actually, the font IS a Roman font. In typography Roman can either mean a serif 
font or an upright (not slanted, not italic) font. (Check wikipedia on this 
point.)  The Bitstream Vera font name uses Roman in the second sense.

In any case this font name was generated by the genfontmap.ps utility that 
comes with ghostscript, which extracts the font name directly from the TTF font 
file. That is what I used to generate a new fontmap for ghostscript; I did not 
choose the font names.

No matter; this is not part of the problem in any case.

> 
>        character: ‘ (8216, #o20030, #x2018)
> 
> in the PDF file via a CMAP (character mapping) in the PDF output file! Heh, 
> this is a GNU service! Messages from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) are 
> quoted in these "typographic" single or double quotes. (For which you can see 
> in the *compilation* buffer lots of \342\200\234, \342\200\235, \342\200\236, 
> \342\200\237 sequences.)
> 
> I tried to use -dCMAPDEBUG -dTTFDEBUG to debug a bit what gs is doing, but 
> it's not clear why and when which CMap file gets inserted. Maybe you can find 
> on the Ghostscript home page a clue to get specific ps2pdfwr help.
> 

Well, thanks for the information, Peter, but this line of analysis may not help 
very much, I fear.

The content of the pdf file is not directly relevant to the problem, nor is 
ps2pdfwr. The problem arises before conversion to pdf.

In my earlier posts I pointed out that the backquote IS preserved in the simple 
little postscript example that I supplied. It is preserved in interactive 
ghostscript, and also by my modified ps2pdfwr script so that the backquote 
appears properly in the resulting pdf file.

However, postscript generated by ps-print does NOT preserve the backquote - 
even when viewed interactively in ghostscript, without converting to pdf. So 
something about the way ps-print generates postscript is interfering with the 
use of the added fonts, perhaps.

Thus inspecting the resulting PDF is unlikely to tell us anything interesting. 
It would be far easier to just inspect the original postscript generated by 
ps-print.

> 
> What keeps you from using mac-print-mode? It preserves the backquote. Or 
> /quoteleft in PostScript.

By now I already have more than one way of printing that preserves the 
backquote. But I am still interested in getting ps-print to work as I believe 
it should.

> 
> --
> Greetings
> 
>  Pete
> 
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>