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lowercase/italic latin "d" mysteriously replaced when PDF is printed?!?

hughmcguire
Hi Mike et al,

Here is a strange one, from a PressBooks user.

* PDF produced, using embedded fonts (Crimson Text).
* PDF looks fine on screen
* but when printing (with a high-end Cannon, and two desktop printers ) the lowercase, italic latin "d" is coming out as ... a blotch.

I have tried to reproduce without success on HP and Sharp printers.

Anyone have any ideas what is going on?

Attached are:
1. the offending PDF, which looks fine on my screen (see Preface, line 4 ... "Thousan_d_ Faces").
2. a scan of the printed page showing the bug (see Preface, line 4 ... "Thousan_d_ Faces").

Can anyone reproduce?
Does anyone have any ideas what might be going on? Suggestions of how to address it?

NOTE that the user reports this problem with a stylesheet with another font as well (Cardo).




  1. Original-PDF-with-d-problem.pdf‎ 162.8 kB ‎
    original-pdf
  2. Scan-of-print-output-with-d-problem.pdf‎ 101.4 kB ‎
    scan of print output
mikeday
That's really strange. Would you be able to generate a simpler PDF from HTML like this:
<html>
<body style="font-family: Crimson Text; font-style: italic">
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9<br/>
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ) ! @ # $ % ^ &amp; * (
</body>
</html>

It would be good to test with both Crimson Text and also Cardo, and with PDF compression enabled (the default) and disabled (with --no-compress).

If this reproduces the problem, could you send me the PDF files with compression disabled?
hughmcguire
hi mike here are 2 PDF files as requested: Crimson & Cardo.

note that I can't reproduce the error ... but i'll see what the client says with these files.

and we'll test compression vs. non-compression.


  1. The-D-Problem-Cardo.pdf‎ 25.8 kB
  2. The-D-Problem-crimson.pdf‎ 12.1 kB
hughmcguire
update: we've had another user report this problem, in pre-press with Amazon's Createspace.

The culprit (according to Amazon) is the Crimson Text font on Google Fonts:
http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Crimson+Text

Says Amazon:

"We can confirm that this issue is due to the font that is being used for the italicized text (Crimson Text, Italic). We recommend using a different font. Though this does appear to be embedded, this is not appearing as expected in print and the concern is being duplicated when we attempt to reprocess the file."


It seems as if the designer has a new version of Crimson (not up on Google Fonts)... and I am investigating whether that will solve the problem. Says Sebastian Kosch:

Please be aware that the good folks over on Google's webfonts team are still offering a very much outdated version of the font, with both clumsy outlines and clumsy spacing, despite my regular reminder emails.


I will report back here as soon as I have more info about whether or not newer versions of Crimson have the same problems.



Edited by hughmcguire

hughmcguire
Just to put this one to bed: it turns out the problem was the Crimson font from Google Fonts.

An updated version of the font had no such problems.
hughmcguire
You can find the new version here (which has many improvements):
http://aldusleaf.org/0-crimson.html
mikeday
Great, good to hear it's all working now.