Re: [Groff] Broken character widths in default font

[Robert D. Goulding]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Egil Kvaleberg wrote:

> On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 15:55, Robert D. Goulding wrote:
>
> > The pdfwriter in the 7.x series
> > of ghostscript is broken - fi and fl ligatures come out with incorrect
> > metrics, sometimes overwriting the next character, sometimes leaving a
> > large gap.
>
> >  For all I know, this may be the case with ø as well.
>
> You are entirely correct!
>
> Investigating closer (didn't have time when I saw it), the problem does
> not appear in the generated Postscript. But running ps2pdf, it
> occurs in the PDF. Not every time, but often enough. It does not seem to
> occur in trivial test documents.
>
> The same problem appears when viewing with xpdf, gv and acroread, and my
> printer saw the same problem, so it is obviously with the PDF generator.
>
> >  For all I know, this may be the case with ø as well.
>
> I've only seen the problem with the upper case variant, Ø (which is 216
> in ISO-8859-1).
>
> Anyway, this quite effectively points the finger away from groff!
>
> Egil
>
> PS: Seems to be a known problem, then? Do you know more about it? Is
> someone looking at it?

When I had this problem myself, I found several outstanding bug reports on
this issue at the ghostscript site.  I don't know whether this has been
fixed in the most recent release - but one would think it would be a
priority.  Then again, it's been broken since the first release in the
7.xx series, which was some time ago...

Robert

-- 
Robert Goulding
Society of Fellows
Joseph Henry House
Princeton NJ 08544