Re: [Groff] Goofy spacing in devps

[Robert D. Goulding]

>
> Not knowing much about typesetting, I do not know what kerning and
> ligature is.  My letters tend to run together, or be spaced out too far.
> It occurs consistently;  certain words are mangled the same every time.
> The condition appears to be independant of font;  I have tried using
> three different fonts, and get identical results;  the words are mangled
> exactly the same way in Helvetica as they are in Courier.
>
>
Is this mangling apparent only in pdf files obtained by running postscript
output through ps2pdf?  If so, it is the infamous ghostscript ligature
bug, which affects all 7.xx versions of ghostscript; either downgrade to a
release in the 6.xx series (my favourite, GNU gs 6.53) or upgrade to the
AFPL 8.xx (which, as has been discussed here recently, has its own
collection of nasty pdf bugs).  Some releases in the 7.xx series will give
correct results if you use ps2pdf13 instead of ps2pdf -- but not the
latest GNU 7-series ghostscript, in which all the ps2pdf scripts give the
ligature bug.

If you're seeing this mangling in the postscript output, rather than pdf,
then I have no idea what's causing it - I've never seen such a thing.

Robert.