fascinating but not remotely connected to my problem!
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Adding Fonts to Ghostscript
Symptom: Some of my VFP reports produce a blank page when I run them through the Bullzip/Ghostscript pdf converter. After much research I am confident that the problem is down to the fonts I'm using in the report. But we're not talking obscure fonts here. One of the problem fonts is "Times New Roman", so I'm not about to tell my users to switch fonts. Clearly we need to tell Ghostscript how to find the fonts we want to use.
The documentation available on the web is contradictory and confusing.
Do we need a fontmap or not with version 8.64 of Bullzip (or version 8.70 of ghostscript which I've also installed in an attempt to troubleshoot the problem)
If so what exactly do we call it ("fontmap" or "fontmap.gs") and where do we put it?
do we need to use tools like ttfpt1.exe to convert the relevant fonts to ps fonts first?
do we need to set environtmental variables like GS_FONTPATH in order for Ghostscript to be able to find the fonts?
if so, where do we set such variables, in the windows environment or one of the gs###.ps files and if the latter, which one?
and so on. The more I read the more confusing it all gets.
If anyone can provide an authoritative idiot guide to "How to make Ghostscript Accept Windows Fonts" I'd happily award you 5000 points. Unfortunately the rules limit the reward to 500 points so I can only hope that and my eternal gratitude will suffice.
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Answers
Problem Solved. Don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's taken me 72 hours of fairly intense effort to crack this one so at the very least I think I'm going to get very very drunk.
The solution was buggerall to do with fonts or ghostscript. It was the "Printer Environment" flag in VFP. If that flag is set on, the report is tied to a specific printer (whichever one was the windoze default at the time the flag was set) and that completely screws up the attempt to turn it into a pdf. Turn off the flag and the pdfs pop out good as gold, regardless of fonts and other graphics.
In my own defence, I had been led on the wild goose chase by the fact that I could see that the intermediate files (the postscript files which ghostscript converts to pdfs) were apparently all unique and appeared to contain proper content. This fooled me into believing that the problem was the other side of the postscipt generator. It was only when I found another report failing to pdf with apparently acceptable fonts that I finally noticed the offending (and completely unecessary) flag...
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by: jcimarronPosted on 2009-10-17 at 17:06:16ID: 25598118
mjacobs2929--I view webpages and/or download image files. I do not create them.
From time to time, if I forget, and use the mouse scroll wheel , I will go from file to file and eventually be told that I must download Ghostscript. I used to do that and all was well. I learned that just closing the original file I was trying to open would allow opening the file with no further mention of Ghostscript. I do not know if this has any relevance to your problem as a site coder if I understand correctly.
But maybe a coder will find this helpful
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~