Bug 111485

Summary:	Using curves instead characters in KDE print subsystem is wrong solution
Product:	[Unmaintained] kdeprint	Reporter:	Andrey Cherepanov <sibskull>
Component:	general	Assignee:	KDEPrint Devel Mailinglist <kde-print-devel>
Status:	CLOSED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal	CC:	jlayt
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	RedHat Enterprise Linux
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Andrey Cherepanov 2005-08-25 14:57:25 UTC

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.4.2)
Installed from:    RedHat RPMs
OS:                Linux

I encounter fundamental kdeprint problem: characters are printed as curves in PostScript. It rise some problem in real printing on the paper and PS/PSD export.

I try to print from any KDE application to PDF format. PDF document looks fine, but:
1. On real print this PDF document some characters are overlapped (see my bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93169)
2. Generated PDF doesn't import to KWord (trash insead text). Open PDF from OpenOffice.org works fine.

How can I disable transformation from text to curves in KDE print subsystem?
Why print subsystem of OpenOffice.org work correctly than kdeprint?

Comment 1 Michael Goffioul 2005-08-25 15:04:26 UTC

kdeprint is not the actual responsible of the print content, it's a mix of Qt  (the PS rasterizer) and the application (which sends drawing primitives to Qt). Qt does not produce PDF natively (this should change in future versions), so to produce PDF, kdeprint relies on ghostscript to perform the PS->PDF conversion. This is maybe at that stage that your problem appears. Note that you can tune the PS->PDF conversion by opening the PDF-printer properties dialog and going to the "Driver Settings" tab, but I don't know it this will solve your problem.

Michael.

Comment 2 Andrey Cherepanov 2005-08-25 16:31:05 UTC

Ok, I try to print text "test" from kwrite to PostScript. After this operation I open generated PostScript and cannot find text "test" in this file. So problem is in PostScript generation. I guess, Qt resterized has wrong behaviour, but my knowledge (in English and in programming) is not enough for resolve this bug with Qt team. Do you help me?

Comment 3 Michael Goffioul 2005-08-25 16:37:55 UTC

The text is there, but it is encoded. If I'm right, you should see in the PS file a font definition section, with the characters that are actually used by your file (in your case "tes"), which forms some kind of a database. Then the PS simply put references to this database to output text (an index in the character table). At least, this happens when Qt embeds fonts in the PS.

Michael.

Comment 4 Andrey Cherepanov 2005-08-25 17:08:11 UTC

PostScript contains for "test" text output:
[1 0 0 1 0 0]ST
B P1
NB
W BC
F1 F
9 Y<0001000200030001>[7 0 7 0 7 0 0 0]28 0 XYT

I expect: 
xx xx moveto
(test) show

Can anybody explains how to generate PostScript with text in Qt?

Comment 5 Michael Goffioul 2005-08-25 17:12:44 UTC

Did you try to disable font embedding in Qt (with "qtconfig")?

Comment 6 Andrey Cherepanov 2005-08-26 07:48:11 UTC

Yeah! After font embedding by qtconfig I can open generated PDF (but without formatting). So it still exists problem described in the bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93169

Thanks for help, I close this bug.

Comment 7 John Layt 2008-12-31 18:57:36 UTC

Closing old Resolved status bug.