The missing Times & Helvetica fonts.

Symptoms

Some valid Level II PS files cannot any longer be compiled by the Distiller. In the absense of these fonts, VTeX/GeX will fail to initialize properly.

Affected

Both the VTeX and the Distiller users, albeit in different ways.

VTeX solution

We currently recommend installing Acrobat 3 as a source of Times and Helvetica fonts. This does not interfere with using Acrobat 4 as the default Reader. VTeX 6.4+ will correctly recognize the fonts from both the Acrobat 3 and the Acrobat 4 distributions.

The missing lower parts of Math Extention fonts.

Symptoms

Lower parts of Math Extention Symbols are not printed on HP PCL (and many similar printers). This happens even to documents which worked correctly in Acrobat 3.

Affected

Anybody who does mathematics in PDF files and either uses HP printers or distributes his PDF files.

VTeX solution

VTeX 6.4 has a transparent workaround to this problem.

Discovered by

Timothy van Zandt

The inverted images.

Symptoms

Some images which were "black-on-white" suddenly become "white-on-black" when printed on HP PCL (and many similar) devices. Specifically, this seems to be happening to the /Indexed 2-color images which have a palette with the 1st entry larger than the 2nd.

Affected

Anybody who uses black and white images in PDF files and either uses HP printers or distributes his PDF files.

Test file

See a4ibug.zip for a full example. While the example involves a TeX file, the problem can easily be reproduced without VTeX. Notice that the two included images picgood.bmp and picbad.bmp are both valid bitmapped images which will be shown identically in PaintBrush, or by Acrobat preview/PS print; however, after inclusion into PDF, picgood.bmp prints correctly (on all printers), but picbad.bmp gets reversed (on HP's).

Secondary Symptoms

Documents which contain large affected images will often print much longer. [it takes longer to print black than white.]

VTeX solution

VTeX 6.45 has a transparent workaround to this problem.