PDF Output

[Petra Zamburek]

Hi!

When using italic followed by a punctuation, in pdf you can see a gap:

eg.
non-italic.
italic .

Is this as designed or a bug?

H&M 7.0.9 Build 3791

Thanks in advance
Petra

[Tim Green]

Hi Petra,

Your copy of Help+Manual is out of date. Please get the current installer for version 7.1.0 Build 3925 here and install "on top" to update (this won't change any settings etc.):

http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html?upd

The problem you describe is most likely caused by an incompatible reference printer driver for generating PDF files. H&M uses a printer driver to generate PDFs. You can access the reference printer driver settings in View > Program Options > PDF. By default, H&M will use the screen device driver, but you can often get better results by using a real printer driver. By the same token, some printer drivers can also cause problems, particularly optimized drivers from printer manufacturers. It is generally better to use one of the standard drivers supplied with Windows.

If you have Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 we recommend using the Microsoft XPS Document Writer driver included with these versions of Windows. It produces good results and is always pre-installed. You just need to select it as your reference driver. Otherwise you can activate and select one of the known good standard drivers included with Windows. You don't have to actually have the physical printer. Just add the driver with Add Printer in the printer section of the Windows Control Panel and then select it as your reference driver in Help & Manual. The standard Windows Brother HL-2040 and HL-2060 drivers deliver good results, and standard LaserJets and DeskJets are usually also OK.

Important Notes:

DON'T use use "PDF printer drivers" like Adobe Distiller for this! This will not work properly and is actually counter-productive.

The default page size set for the printer driver in the Windows control panel must be at least as large as the page size you have set in your print manual template. If it is smaller you will get clipping in your PDF pages.

[Petra Zamburek]

Hi Tim,

finally we moved to the latest version, but unfortunately this problem persists.
So i did my tests again, here are the facts:

The gap exists just in pdf - Webhelp is fine.
The gap exists after almost each text formatted with Tahoma italic.
The longer the text the bigger the gap.
It does not matter which option in the configuration for PDF-Export is selected, the gaps wont go away.

We export our projects with batch.
Even if i select Microsoft XPS Document Writer in Configuration / PDF Export and the same printer is my default-printer, we have the gaps.

But: sometimes it helped to start the export out of the project (project / export / batch-export / selecting the corresponding command for pdf-export / starting the action) and using XPS, sometimes some of the gaps disappeared - but not all of them.
At the moment this way also doesn't work.
I absolutely can't reproduce this.

So i built two test-projects (one with Tahoma one with Arial): Tahoma - gaps, Arial - no gaps.
Even an export out of the project with XPS doesn't work in my test-project.
There is no difference in formatting explicitly italic or by style.
Doing the same with Arial, everything's fine.

Any ideas?

Windows 10
ham 7.2.0 4035

Thank you in advance
Petra

[Tim Green]

Hi Petra,

This is a problem in PDF triggered by some fonts. You can fix it by going to Configuration > Publishing Options > PDF > Font Embedding and switching the embedding option to Type 3 Fonts.

[Petra Zamburek]

Hey, cool!

Thank you very very much.

Petra

[Tim Green]

Petra,

Explanation of what is actually happening: Tahoma, like some other fonts, does not actually have any italic version. When you choose italic in Tahoma Windows simply "distorts" the letters a little. When the PDF engine has to do the same thing the letters would have to have exactly the same dimensions in order to take up the space defined by the font, but it is always off a little bit, and you end up with the additional space after the "distorted" sequence. It works with Type 3 because that actually generates and embeds a complete dynamic font for every variant (actually, it's more complicated but that is effectively the result), and there the dimensions are known for every character. The disadvantage of Type 3 is that the characters are then not quite as sharp.

The best solution for this issue is to only use fonts that really have the variants that you need to use, and to avoid using variants that need to be simulated. You can see this if you look at the list of fonts in the Fonts panel in the Windows Control Panel. Fonts that have native variants are shown as a stack of icons and when you double-click on the stack you can see all the native variants that they have.