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Skeptical NY’er Doggedly Pursues XPS & PDF Myths
September 22, 2007

Has this ever happened to you? You innocently get involved in a conversation which evolves into a controversy. You start asking questions – simply to determine the truth and the answers are either unclear or suspicions. Motivated by skepticism you doggedly pursue the answers and are both relieved and disturbed when you reach the truth.

This occurred to me last year when I got a phone call from the high school asking if  I had called and excused my son from his last two periods. This led to some tough questions to both parties and led to the conclusion that my 15 year old had called the school and pretended to be me and excused himself from school. OMG. LOL.

While secretly a little voice inside  was quoting a line from “Top Gun” which was - “Gustiest move I ever saw man”. My outside voice sounded more like a line from “Mr. Roberts” and said “'The worst thing I can do to you is to keep you right here, mister' - you’re  grounded”.

After hearing these unconfirmed reports at the show, writing about them here and seeing these denials I am starting to feel the way I did when the vice principal called. There is deep sinking feeling in my stomach and I am wondering if I doggedly pursue this with both parties I may be both relieved and disturbed when I reach the truth. Maybe someone thinks we can't handle the truth.

However being the stubborn skeptical NY’er I am, I have not given up on these unconfirmed reports. That's a odd and unfriendly term. I think at this point maybe we should call these Myths.

At this point we are not getting any answers using normal channels. Therefore it may be time for a mid-course correction and enlist the help of some friends. So I am actively soliciting you to volunteer to join the GAM Myth Busters team. Our goal is to see if these myths are “busted” or “confirmed”.  

At this point I must admit that the Myths about printing Type 1 fonts from Office 2007 to a PostScript device are looking busted. I am hearing that printing fonts is working fine. I am still waiting for answers about transparency and gradients - so that's still unclear.

But I am still hearing that exporting to PDFs and XPS with Type 1 is not working right. And you can help answer test this Myth. Its actually really easy. If your running Windows 2007 and own Type 1 fonts it will only take a few minutes to see for yourself.

Download the save as PDF and save as XPS tools . Create a document with Type 1 fonts and use a bunch of Type 1 fonts just in case one has a embedding restriction. Save these files as XPS and PDF. Then compare the Word document side by side with the XPS and PDF documents. If they match perfectly then the Myths are busted. If they look like big smudges made by greasy fingers (bit-mapped) or a different fonts (font substitution) then there confirmed. Then tell us your experiences by posting a comment - below.

Posted by Howie Fenton on September 22, 2007 | Comments (0)