i'm having trouble Font Problem - print overlaps on mac only, not PC

Hello,

We had an issue with a job on Friday - I set up a FusionPro Job (Using FusionPro Desktop 6.0p1F. specd as follows:

13 pages - each page has a different letter on it - the only variable object on each page is the salutation of the letter - the remainder of the pages were static and not set up in fusion pro frames. Each page was set as unused and named in Manage Pages -> page usage - and then an OnRecordStart rule pulled which page to use based on a field in the database. Each page also had signatures on them that were part of the static page - the signatures and page were all less then 150kb total - and their were a bit less than 2200 records in the database.

The files composed fine and looked great on the screen. When printed from my Mac however - the date, which was static background text, not in a FusionPro Frame, "September 2009", and was above the variable salutation would look bad on some of the letters (text spacing was way off - some letters lying on top of others, etc.) - it seemed to occur on only 2 of the letters. This happened when printing on my 2 x 2.26 GHZ Quad Core Intel Xeon mac, 6 Gigs Ram running OS X 10.5.8 - the PDF created was only about 5.7 megabytes. If I ran the same pages that were bad by themselves (printing just that page number from the PDF) the page would output fine. This problem occurred when outputting to both of our digital copiers (Konica Minolta bizHub Pro 1050, and a Canon ImageRunner 8500 with a fiery rip.)

I took the same exact file and moved it to a PC (which much lower specs then my mac) and it ran fine.

Any ideas?

Mario Lima

Movad

Graphics Department

Is the .pdf directly imported into the RIPS or are you printing from Acrobat to the RIP?

What is the name of the font that is being "garbled?"

The font that is used is Times - 12 pt - very simple.

And we are printing the PDFs to the printers.

The font that is used is Times - 12 pt - very simple.

 

And we are printing the PDFs to the printers.

I wonder if the static .pdfs that were used as the background, not going thru FP would print the same from the MAC? I would suspect the Font has some type of licensing restrictions on it or is a embedded subset that doesn't play well on the MAC-side.

How are .pdfs being created?

Can you "embed" the font into the .pdf(distiller settings/PITSTOP-plug-in)?

I wonder if the static .pdfs that were used as the background, not going thru FP would print the same from the MAC? I would suspect the Font has some type of licensing restrictions on it or is a embedded subset that doesn't play well on the MAC-side.

 

How are .pdfs being created?

Can you "embed" the font into the .pdf(distiller settings/PITSTOP-plug-in)?

The original files were PC word documents - the only variable info in them were the salutations. They also used fonts on the PC that we didn't have on the Mac (we only have FusionPro on our Macs).

So I figured just remove the salutations, print to file (.prn) from word, distill them using our custom settings which embeds fonts, then drop the PDFs into the InDesign shell template to make sure everything fit - add the variable element (the salutation) in InDesign - then exported it to a FusionPro PDF.

Wouldn't you normally get a warning that a font can't be embedded if your fonts have a licensing issue, and also you would then have a font that didn't display as embedded or embedded subset when you went to File -> Properties -> Fonts (I double checked there and everything said either embedded or embedded subset.)

I've never found too much success with WORD docs. and variable data, especially if you have to go between platforms.

You mentioned you are using "Times" for the font. Did you mean the system font Times New Roman?

I haven't experienced this with Fusion Pro but have with been through this with XMPie. I tried several different ways(press quality, high-quality, custome, etc...) to "distill" the .prn file, even re-postscripting the .pdf and then distilling again. I think I ended "outlining" the font with PITSTOP and called it a day.

I'm sure there is some "reasonable" explanation for this but sometimes you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work.

Good luck and if you have to do a lot of cross-platform Word docs, I would look into the font that is giving you problems and see if there is an alternative format that would work better? ex. TT font to OTF font or .PS font. Check out http://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype/ for a font conversion program. I've used this program for years and it's been noted on here as well for the program to use.