Brother laser printer and GNU FreeFont
 

I seek for the Brother laser printer owners which would be willing to install in the system GNU FreeFont and perform the test described below. The results of these tests would be helpful for the Savannah guys – depending of the results you can confirm or deny my bug report concerning the mentioned fonts.

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I use GNU FreeFont (see: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/ and http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.0/system/freefont/) because it’s very well designed. Unfortunately these fonts produce bad results with my Brother HL-5340D laser printer. Some characters using diacritics are printed bad – the accents are moved down or to the left.

The following sample includes Polish and French diacritic characters:

I printed them using GNU FreeFont 20120503. Brother HL-5340D produces the invalid results for the following glyphs from the above set:

FreeSerif:
Regular: ËÏÜëü
Bold: none
Italic: ËÏÜëü
BoldItalic: ËÏÜëü

FreeSans:
Regular: ËÏÜëü
Bold: ËÏÜëü
Italic: ËÏÜëü
BoldItalic: ËÏÜëü

FreeMono:
Regular: ĆŃÓŚŹ ÉÀÈÙ
Bold: ĆŃÓŚŹćńóśź ÉÀÈÙéàèù
Italic: none
BoldItalic: ĆŃÓŚŹćńóśź ÉÀÈÙéàèù

I reported that problem on Savannah almost two years ago (see: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32220). I described also the method which I invented in order to repair most of the glyphs (see: comment #15). My method improves all glyphs using acute and grave accents such as Ó or À but it spoils some other glyphs using diaeresis accents such as Ï. So using it I can repair all wrong acute and grave accents in FreeMono font but the glyphs Ë, Ï, and Ü are spoiled in Regular and Bold shapes.

As a result my method of repairing those characters is unacceptable for the Savannah guys. Steve White suggested that the firmware used in my printer is wrong. I think that there’s something wrong with these fonts and that problem appears in some specific situations.

The mentioned problem concerns only the texts printed from the source file (I use LibreOffice). The glyphs look well on the screen and can be properly exported to PDF file. Acrobat Reader prints these PDF files well.

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Now I look for some guys or gals owning different Brother laser printers. I’d like to ask you to install GNU FreeFont 20120503 (see: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/free...f-20120503.zip) in the system and to test FreeMono font in Regular, Bold, and BoldItalic shapes using the set of the characters quoted above. In the perfect world it’d be nice to have the results of the tests preformed: 1) on the printer from the other series such as MFC, 2) on the other printer from the same HL series, and 3) on the other HL-5340 printer.