Win9x: AdobePS 4.4 printer driver - problems related to text

[Shlomo Perets <shlomo -at- microtype -dot- com>]

Adobe's web site has a new universal Windows printer driver installer, 
which installs a new AdobePS 4.4 driver on Windows 9x; Adobe PS 5.1.2 on 
Windows NT (and a different driver for Windows 2000).

I recommend not to use the new AdobePS 4.4 printer driver (Win95/Win98) for 
PDF production. At least with the currently-available ATM 4.0, it is 
faulty. Stay with AdobePS 4.3.1, included in the Acrobat 4.05 CD (AdobePS 
4.3.1 was removed from Adobe's web site).

FrameMaker 5.5.x (and possibly other releases):
Several common Adobe Type 1 fonts -- including Helvetica, Times, Avantgarde 
and Bookman - end up as MSTT31xxx fonts in the PDF. Text copied & pasted 
results in boxes; with other fonts you might have missing letters (mostly 
vowels, in some or all paragraphs). The Find function in the resulting PDFs 
will therefore become useless or unreliable.

Excel97:
Text using the "problem" fonts is transformed to a bitmap in the PDF, and 
the text is not even selectable (and not reported in Acrobat's Font Info 
dialog box).

Word97:
I did not notice a similar problem when using Word97 in conjunction with 
the new driver.

If you install this driver, or if it will be installed automatically when 
installing an Adobe application, carefully inspect a few typical PDFs 
before adopting the driver for regular work.



Shlomo Perets

MicroType * http://www.microtype.com
FrameMaker-to-Acrobat: TimeSavers / Advanced Techniques Course / Solutions