ciancarini-paolo@cs.yale.edu (paolo ciancarini) (05/09/91)
I have just installed my Adobe Type Manager 2.0 in my MacPortable, system 6.0.4; I removed my old fonts, and started using the fonts that came with the package. Since in my office there is not an Appletalk connection, I print my Mac documents on a laserprinter connected to a Sun. I upload my Postscript files using a serial cable and a terminal program; then I print the files from the Sun using the program macps. I see that after installing ATM the Postscript files created by my Mac are MUCH MUCH longer: for instance, a one page Word file, that before ATM was about 2-3K when saved as postscript, now it is more than 50K ! So uploading the files now takes minutes instead of seconds. I would like to keep installed ATM, but also have short Postscript files to upload. Is this impossible? Note that I did a try also disactivating ATM through the Control Panel before creating the Postscript image, but nothing changed: huge files were created again. Any help will be appreciated. And any pointer to a document introducing ATM, Truetype, Type 1 fonts, type 3 fonts, etc., would be welcome (is there a FAQ in this newsgroup? I never saw one in the last six months). Paolo Ciancarini
lardieri@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stephen P Lardieri) (05/09/91)
Before printing a file, the laserwriter driver checks to see if any fonts need to be downloaded. Normally, it asks the attached laserwriter for a font directory, and then compares this to the fonts requested in the file it is printing. If it finds a font in the file that isn't already in the laser printer, it looks for it in the System Folder and the application's folder. If it can't find a PostScript font there, it creates a bitmap equal to (about) 4 times the size needed, and downloads that instead. Since there is no laser printer attached to your machine, the laserwriter driver thinks there are no fonts already resident in the printer it is "printing" to, so it tries to download EVERY font used in the document. Naturally, all those fonts are present in the System Folder; you installed them there when you were installing ATM. So they all get included in the PostScript file you are making with cmd-F. The only way around this that I know of is to rename the PostScript fonts in the System Folder before trying to print. Turning off ATM will do nothing, since it isn't ATM's fault that the fonts' postscript code is getting included in the first place; it's the LaserWriter driver's fault.
elliott@veronica.cs.wisc.edu (James Elliott) (05/10/91)
In <1991May8.185123.6001@cs.yale.edu> ciancarini-paolo@cs.yale.edu (paolo ciancarini) writes: > I print my Mac documents on a laserprinter connected to a Sun. > I upload my Postscript files > using a serial cable and a terminal program; > then I print the files from the Sun using the program macps. > I see that after installing ATM the Postscript files created by my > Mac are MUCH MUCH longer: for instance, a one page Word file, that > before ATM was about 2-3K when saved as postscript, now it is more > than 50K ! So uploading the files now takes minutes instead of > seconds. I discovered the same problem last fall. It's not ATM's fault at all, actually, but the LaserWriter driver: Whenever you print a document that uses PostScript fonts for which the outline fonts are available in the System folder, it will assume that the fonts are not available on the printer, and put a copy of those fonts into the PostScript file. Adobe Type Manager needs the outline fonts in order to render the nice characters on your display, and so it needs outlines even for fonts that are in the printer ROM. So, unfortunately, you end up with redundant fonts making your documents huge (in my case, growing from 30K to >400K sometimes.) Fancier page-design programs (like Aldus PageMaker) know about the fonts resident in different printers, and make their own decisions about which fonts to download. However, it's still necessary to use other programs from time to time, so it would be nice to have a workaround. Also, even if I am using fonts that are NOT built in to the printer (which is pretty frequently these days), I'd prefer to be able to upload them just once, and then keep a copy on the UNIX side to make things faster from then on. So, I wrote a program to do these things. It is called StripFonts, and it takes a PostScript file and strips out fonts that are built in to the printer. It knows about LaserWriters and LaserWriter Pluses (which include the II series, as far as fonts go), and can read Aldus Printer Descriptions to learn about different printers. It also will strip out fonts that it knows you have already uploaded to UNIX. (There is a UNIX end that restores them to the document before sending it to the printer, and which generates reports about what fonts are available that can be downloaded back to the Mac to tell StripFonts what to strip.) The program is written in Think C using the Think Class Library (what a gift to fledgling programmers!) and seems pretty robust. However, there are a few things unfinished: There is no documentation yet, and there are some features I wanted to add, like manual editing of font lists from within the program. My summer break starts in a week, and I was planning to deal with these issues then. So, if you can wait a few weeks I can give you a polished version of the program. If not, I can mail you the current one, which works fine for me, and try to explain it. Note that the UNIX side is presently written as a shell script and Emacs LISP, so you will need to have GNU Emacs in order to use it. This is another thing I want to fix; I'd like to have a nice portable C program on the UNIX end. >Paolo Ciancarini -- Jim Elliott "Like a bridge he'll come between us, not a wall" elliott@veronica.cs.wisc.edu