Postscript files rendered by ghostscript use probably oversized font, at least for Courier.
Files generated with a2ps or enscript, which look (gv) and print perfectly on MDK10.0 or older, on MDK10.1 tend to have too long lines going out of the page and/or overlapping lines.

I checked all procedures with the same file on both 10.0 and 10.1 systems: result is always the same, i.e. with 10.0 everything is fine, but goes wrong with 10.1.

There is no problem when I send the PS file directly to a postscript printer. It is printed properly even if looks badly in ghostview.

Files /usr/share/ghostscript/7.07/lib/Fontmap.GS are identical on mdk10.0 and 10.1, and both say that GS uses file n022003l.pfb for standard Courier typeface.
n022003l.pfb comes from urw-fonts package - maybe the problem is with urw-fonts?
I am curious if anyone else suffered from the similar problems (*) - thanks in advance for info.


MWtee


(*) Probably the fastest way to test that is to take any file.txt with lines longer than some 80 characters and doing "a2ps -o file.ps file.txt" and viewing fil.ps in gv (ghostview).

I have the same problem. You've gotten farther in investigating it than I have, but I still have both MDK 10.0 and 10.1 systems here, so I'll check some more to see where the difference comes from. It's a severe problem for me because I have a lot of text documents that I print using enscript on a printer that doesn't have PostScript built in.

The only difference that I have discovered so far is between files with the relevant font.

On MDK10.0 there is (from the package urw-fonts-2.0-11mdk):
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 96205 Jan 29 2004 /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n022003l.pfb

while on MDK10.1 (from urw-fonts-2.0-14mdk):
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 149414 Aug 7 17:22 /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n022003l.pfb

I plan to replace that file on MDK10.1 with its equivalent from MDK10.0 and check if it helps in case of Courier font.
Do you have the same problem with other typefaces (e.g. Times) either?

Like Courier10, Courier9 also displays way too large, but Times-Roman10 seems to be OK. These are the only ones I've tried.

Looking at the top of the .pfb files, apparently Mandrake regenerated them using a new tool, FontForge instead of PfaEdit. All of the file sizes are different.

For now, I've gone back to urw-fonts-2.0-11mdk from Mandrake 10.0, and it fixes the problem.

I've also tried to report the bug to Mandrakesoft by filing an incident on makndrakeexport. Do you know if there is some better way to report bugs to them than that? The site seems to be having problems right now and I'm not sure whether it accepted my incident or dropped it on the floor.

p.s. I did get my incident to take on the second try. The first time I gave it too long a title (I think), got a raft of error messages from the web site, and the incident didn't show up. The second time I tried a shorter title and still got two error messages, but this time the incident registered.

See:
http://www.mandrakeexpert.com/index1...dent=86073&w=0

I'm not 100% sure, but Bugzilla at http://qa.mandrakesoft.com seems to be the right place.

P.S.
1. Please let me know if you'd rather prefer me to report that bug and temporary solution (installing RPM from mdk10.0) to Bugzilla.
2. Unfortunately it's impossible for me to view your report on mandrakeexpert, but
I also reported the problem there on Nov 1st, see(?) http://www.mandrakeexpert.com/index1...dent=85452&w=0

Thanks. I thought they had a bugzilla somewhere, but I couldn't find a link to it from mandrakelinux.com. Those web sites are a bit of a haystack. If you're ready to file a bug in bugzilla, that's cool. I can put a comment on it afterward if I have any details to add.

I can't view your mandrakeexpert incident either. I guess either incidents are private, or you just can't view other peoples' unless you've paid. (I paid for a silver club membership but didn't buy any boxed products individually.)

OK, I'll file the bug tomorrow from my office where I use mdk10.1 (at home I still have 10.0).

Thanks for the research. Now I know what my problem is too.

I see this issue with Fedora Core 3. Maybe it's a general ghostscript issue?

It may be a general urw-fonts issue. Looking at the change log for Mandrake's urw-fonts RPM, it may be that the error was made by an upstream maintainer, resulting in Fedora picking it up too.

Here are the ChangeLog entries from the point when the fonts last had the right size (2.0-11mdk) to now (2.0-14mdk). You can check the Fedora RPM to see if it comes from the same upstream version.

* Sat Aug 07 2004 Giuseppe Ghibò <ghibo@mandrakesoft.com> 2.0-14mdk
- Use Filippov's version 1.0.7pre35.
* Thu Aug 05 2004 Giuseppe Ghibò <ghibo@mandrakesoft.com> 2.0-13mdk
- Added Patch4 to have Adobe names in a standalone fonts.dir
to avoid confusion with OOo.
- Added links into %{_datadir}/default/fonts/Type1/adobestd35.
* Sat Jul 31 2004 Giuseppe Ghibò <ghibo@mandrakesoft.com> 2.0-12mdk
- Added Source1 (Filippov's URW fonts version 1.0.7pre33).
- Dropped Mashrab Kuratov Source3 (merged into Valek Filippov fonts).
- Dropped Source2 (bold nimbus, merged into Filippov fonts).
- Rebuilt Source4 and fixing weight of some font from Demibold to DemiBold
(avoid problems with mkfontscale).
- Removing trailing space (Source4) from "URW Chancery L " FamilyName.
- Added Patch2 so to list Adobe 35 std font names before URW.
* Thu Jan 29 2004 Giuseppe Ghibò <ghibo@mandrakesoft.com> 2.0-11mdk
- Added %build_rebuild conditional building flag.
- Fixed fonts for bug http://bugs.mandrakelinux.com/query.php?bug=94.
- Dropped Source1: fonts from
ftp://ftp.gnome.ru/fonts/urw/release...7pre22.tar.bz2
and new ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.bz2 are identical, so take the gs one.
- Rebuilt Patch0.

Reverting to fonts from Mandrake 10.0 worked for me also.
Specifically, i found urw-fonts-2.0-11mdk.noarch.rpm on CD #1 for mandrake 10.0 and did:
rpm -i --force urw-fonts-2.0-11mdk.noarch.rpm

Thanks for the hint... i got as far as figuring that the fonts were out of sync with the description files, but i didn't get as far as figuring out which were the font files.

The "Errata" link from www.mandrakelinux.com only lists extremely critical bugs, and not always even those...
Mandrake's bug tracking is at https://qa.mandrakesoft.com/query.cgi
I've never had much luck with finding answers to my problems in there, but your mileage may differ.
I tried several times to post bugs there but even after getting what i thought was proper authorization i never got it to work.... that was a couple of years ago, maybe things are better.

Likewise, if I revert to redhat urw-fonts-2.1-7.rpm, things seem to work well for me too.

Finally I managed to file the bug report into Mandrake's bugzilla as Bug 12493.

Cool. In parallel, I emailed Giuseppe Ghibò at Mandrake using his address from the change log. He asked me for some sample files and screenshots, which I've sent, so hopefully he'll take it from here.