Printing to a file from Freehand MXa or Freehand 10 under Mac OS 10.2.6 had some fonts within a PS family printing properly and others within the same family being bitmapped! I have checked the PS file and it contains bitmapped versions of some of the fonts. This happens without any warning. All the fonts are fine (preview smoothly in Freehand and Suitcase, etc.). When I print from Freehand 8 on the same Mac (under OS 9 Classic) using same fonts (via Suitcase) it prints okay. I have tried:

? Different PPDs---same result
? Running PS print file through Distiller---no good (as expected)
? Moving fonts out from Suitcase into the System Library fonts---same result.
? Printing to a PDF---fonts are okay, but rotated fonts are jaggie
? Creating EPS files, with and without including fonts---work fine if run through Distiller. This is not a great work-around as the file has many pages and bounding boxes, etc.
? Converting fonts to outline---okay, if very time-consuming.

Has anyone else struck this problem? The font family is FF Infotext. InDesign downloads same fonts okay.

I seem to be striking more and more bugs in Freehand related to printing. I have had Truetype fonts cause invalid PS files which don't contain TIFF files, etc. I have had TIFF files not print without warning, i.e., other TIFF files on the same page print, but one won't---and there is nothing wrong with the TIFF file (rescaling the "offending" TIFF will sometimes allow it to print, for example). Moving to another Mac has the same problem. I only upgraded from Freehand 10 because of its font problems (some bold fonts not printing, etc.) only to discover that MX has even more bugs!

Maybe Macromedia needs to invest in a decent output routine. It may be partially Apple's fault, but this is the second version of Freehand for OS X, and Macromedia really have no excuses for such a bug-ridden program.