Win9x: AdobePS 4.4 printer driver - problems related to text

Subject: Win9x: AdobePS 4.4 printer driver - problems related to text
From: Shlomo Perets <shlomo -at- microtype -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 10:15:50 +0100


Adobe's web site has a new universal Windows printer driver installer, which installs a new AdobePS 4.4 driver on Windows 9x; Adobe PS 5.1.2 on Windows NT (and a different driver for Windows 2000).

I recommend not to use the new AdobePS 4.4 printer driver (Win95/Win98) for PDF production. At least with the currently-available ATM 4.0, it is faulty. Stay with AdobePS 4.3.1, included in the Acrobat 4.05 CD (AdobePS 4.3.1 was removed from Adobe's web site).

FrameMaker 5.5.x (and possibly other releases):
Several common Adobe Type 1 fonts -- including Helvetica, Times, Avantgarde and Bookman - end up as MSTT31xxx fonts in the PDF. Text copied & pasted results in boxes; with other fonts you might have missing letters (mostly vowels, in some or all paragraphs). The Find function in the resulting PDFs will therefore become useless or unreliable.

Excel97:
Text using the "problem" fonts is transformed to a bitmap in the PDF, and the text is not even selectable (and not reported in Acrobat's Font Info dialog box).

Word97:
I did not notice a similar problem when using Word97 in conjunction with the new driver.

If you install this driver, or if it will be installed automatically when installing an Adobe application, carefully inspect a few typical PDFs before adopting the driver for regular work.



Shlomo Perets

MicroType * http://www.microtype.com
FrameMaker-to-Acrobat: TimeSavers / Advanced Techniques Course / Solutions






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