Bullets from Helvetica printing from Acrobat,but not from QuarkXPress

[digitaldreamer@adobeforums.com]

This may appear to be a QuarkXPress issue, but I'm trying to set up a preflight rule to flag this potential problem in Adobe Acrobat or PitStop Professional.

I received a PDF (1.4) that was created in QuarkXPress via Distiller 6 on a Mac. The document only contained three fonts, all of which were embedded (subset). It had bullets set in Helvetica that were clearly visible and printable in Acrobat, but not visible in QuarkXPress or printable (it had a capital Z in its place). I tried to embed them, but they were incompatible with my system Helvetica font and Acrobat wasn't able to resolve the encoding.
I ended up outlining the problem area, but we didn't catch the problem until press time. Is there a way to flag this problem during preflight or set up my system fonts so that it doesn't occur again?

It seems to me that my system font is in Unicode and the Helvetica used to create the font was a regular single-byte encoded font. If this is so, how do I get around this issue? Replace my system Helvetica with a Type 1 Postscript?

It's frustrating because from all indications during our normal preflight routine, nothing appeared to be amiss or out of the ordinary. I really can't afford to proofread all unedited PDFs that are printed from QuarkXPress.

kind regards
Michael Jones

[digitaldreamer@adobeforums.com]

I should also state that I'm running Mac OS X 10.4.8, Acrobat 7.0 Pro, and QuarkXPress 6.5

kind regards,
MAJ

[davidpijnacker@adobeforums.com]

You could catch this problem, in QuarkXPress, before making the PDF with a tool such as FlightCheck from Markzware.
Friendly Regards,
David

[Jon Bessant]

Test with InDesign - you'll probably find no issue there ....

Quark re-frys PDFs (converts back to EPS) and then into postscript and
then into Distiller - like baking a cake, freezing it and then placing
in the microwave as such ...

Preflight will not catch this font substitution issue ..

Jon

[digitaldreamer@adobeforums.com]

I already tried bringing into ID and it works perfectly. No surprise there.
I'd move the staff to ID (we already have the Graphics suite) if it wasn't for the Digicomp's plugins SecureX, FormsX6, and eXodus being only QXP.

[peter kleinheider]

Hi

The problem on the is the following:

Mac OS X comes with a Heletica TrueType font installed in the Systems Fonts Folder.
When you now load another Helvetica Type 1, you can not control which Version of the Helvetica should get used.

As Job wrote, XPress converts all PDFs to EPSs when doing a print job or export to PDF. I am not sure if XPress preserves the fonts that are used inside the PDFs. But it looks as if not (in the case of Helvetica)

Try the following: Delete the Helvetica TrueType font out of the Systems Fonts folder (together with Times, Symbol, Zapf) and load the PS1 Version of those fonts using your fontmanagement tool. You have to restart you Mac afterwards.

Own more caution: Apple also delivers an GillSans TrueType font in the Librarys Fonts folder, that could cause similar problems.

best regards

Peter

[digitaldreamer@adobeforums.com]

Thanks, guys, for your answers. And, you too, Peter. That explanation makes sense.

The helvetica typeface that was activated on my system certainly wasn't the same as the original. When I was in Pitstop Pro, I typed over the other characters and they looked exactly the same. However, when I typed in the bullets (option+8 ), they were larger than the originals in the PDF.
I find this interesting, because even though the font is embedded, it was still substituted. Unbelievable. QuarkXPress really does mess things up.

I've been in the industry for 20 years and have been at this new printing job for one month. Because we receive many PDFs of varied specs, I'm already talking with the production staff about switching to Adobe ID for the critical jobs, but use QuarkXPress for our security documents that require Digicomp's extensions.

Thanks again.
MAJ