Suitcase Bridge not passing all font faces to Acrobat Distiller in Classic

J

JeffCGD

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I have recently moved my employer's design studio over to Mac OSX 10.2.4. We are running Suitcase 10.2 and Freehand 10 (updated point release) as our font manager and main artwork layout app (until we fully transition to InDesign 2).

We have been having problems with Suitcase enabling all of some font faces for printing (all Postscript type1 font, of course). In the case of fonts like Adobe Garamond, for example, all the fonts are displayed correctly in Freehand, but when printed, sometimes the italics and semi-bolds will be substituted out with the system default font. The same occurs with other well known fonts such as Goudy.

I have managed to work around most of these occurrences, which I suspect is due to the manner in which you add fonts to Suitcase (you should add fonts the the Suitcase database by the add menu, not by simply dragging the font folders into the set window, which adds them as sets).

Our major problem is that since Acrobat Distiller has to run in classic, and as such there is no "print to PDF" function like in OS9 (you can hack together a Virtual printer using the Distiller OS9 PPD to make your postscript files though), it relies on Suitcase 10's Classic font bridge to pass all the font information to suitcase's font handling engine running in classic, thus activating the fonts for Distiller.
I am finding that not all fonts, and in some cases, not all faces within a font are being correctly activated in classic, even if Distiller completes the PDF without registering an error, producing PDFs with incorrect font faces in them.

See the attached screenshot. The PDF on the left is the failed result, and the Freehand document in the back ground is what it should have been.
 
I've had the same trouble and the only solution I've found is to turn off Suitcase's Classic Bridge and use ATM Deluxe with Auto Activate "On". Hope this helps...
 
I was under the impression that ATM Deluxe conflicts with Suitcase; in fact, Extensis recommends only to use ATM lite for font rendering in OS9/Classic (although this may indeed be the bridge that it conflicts with, so if the bridge is disabled, ATM Deluxe may work fine).

Did you find that using ATM Deluxe to handle the Classic fonts allows for correct PDF output from Distiller when processing Postscript files?

I should mention that Suitcase is not handling printing of fonts that reliably out of the bug-ridden Freehand 10 when it is running in OSX, which currently is what we output most of our artwork from to be PDF'ed, and I am sure that Freehand 10 is mostly at fault. Sometimes the fonts will be replaced by courier, although they are activated correctly because they can be converted to paths without errors. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to when this occurs, as often it comes and goes with the same job.

I look forward to your reply, as this is the only bug we are having with our move to OSX in our Graphics Studio.
 
ATM Deluxe works fine in Classic when Suitcase's Classic Bridge is removed from the Extensions folder. I create a lot of Distilled PDFs from Quark 4.1 and Illustrator without any hassles.

I don't know much about Freehand but an upgrade to MX might hold the solution for you?

If I just could find a solution for Quark's hopeless screen re-drawing in Classic I'll finally be as productive in OS X as I was in 9. Quark 6 may hold the answers.

Good Luck!
 
Thanks for the tip, I will test the Suitcase/ATM setup tomorrow on my test rig at home.

As for your experiences with poor redraw in Quark in Classic, I'm pleased to be able to tell you I saw a third party extension for Quark Express that does just that, not more than a week ago. And now that I look, I find you have not one, but a choice of 2 third party, freeware Xtensions to fix the redraw issue:

http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=16734&db=mac

or

http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=16278&db=mac

Happy Quarking
(hint: InDesign 2.x kicks Quarks butt all over town).
 
Thanks for the reply and solution to my Quark problem. I'll give it a try.

Good luck with the tests, get back to me if you have any problems.

Cheers
 
Bad news on the trial, unfortunately. Adobe Distiller 5.0 no longer causes a font call to ATM Deluxe when running in classic.
The reason your font were auto-activating in Classic is because you were running Quark and/or Illustrator in Classic when you output the Postscript or EPS file before distilling, which caused an auto-activation font call to ATM Deluxe, so they were already active for Distiller.
When I tried distilling an EPS file that had been created from Freehand 10 – which was running in OSX, and has no way of telling classic what fonts are needed (via something like Suitcase's font bridge) – none of the fonts were activated, and the PDF had all of it's fonts defaulted. If Distiller were able to cause auto-activation (apparently this function was REMOVED in version 4), it would have worked.

So, I am back to square one.
The most frustrating thing is that Suitcase 10 HALF works. SOME parts of fonts will Distill, others won't. Half the time the fonts won't print from OSX apps, and then the next time you open the same file, it will. Bizarre, and very, very frustrating.
 
Extensis have just updated Suitcase to v10.2.1. I haven't been able to read any reports as yet but I've downloaded the update and so far so good. Good Luck.
 
Looks like Extensis screwed up again.
Not only is the Suitcase bridge still not working correctly, but Suitcase will only run in the Admin account where it was installed. If I try to run it when logged into any other account, it crashes on startup.
BAD FORM Extensis: making your product WORSE with a point release.
 
Great, thanks Extensis! I guess we wait until the next version of Acrobat rumored to be released in March/April. (Beta screen shot attached)
 

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Hi Snapdove.
Where did you dind that beta pic?
I have to say that I am looking forward to OSX native Distiller, as it is crippling us at work having to run it in Classic (we have to convert all fonts to paths to reliably produce PDFs, or do our artwork in InDesign 2).
 
I found them on a French rumour site last month, along with the info on a April release for Acrobat 6. Attached is another. Do a search in Google. Good Luck.
 

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Troubleshooting Extensis Suitcase 10.2.1: Solution for launch problems

We have received sporadic reports indicating launch failures for some users' installations of Extensis Suitcase 10.2.1. Users received the message ""Font engine not installed. Restart and reinstall," when attempting to open the program.

Martin Snyder offers a workaround that was suggested by Extensis technical support:

Close Suitcase if it is running.

Go to /Users//Library/Preferences and delete the file named 'com.extensis.Suitcase.plist'

While still in the /Users//Library/Preferences/ folder go to the folder named Suitcase Preferences.

Inside the Suitcase Preferences folder delete the file named 'Extensis Suitcase Prefs'.
 
I give up with Extensis. First, 10.1.5. Upgrade to 10.2. Now to 10.2.1. And it still does not work, this piece of crap software!

I have ATM LIGHT 4.6.2a in Classic and I can manage my fonts in Classic with ATM Deluxe (4.6.1 version.) I disabled the suitcase extensions. So tired of this. Now I am training our uses to use SUITCASE for OSX APPS. ATM DELUXE FOR CLASSIC APPS. Two font managers but it works.

Problems not solved with 10.2.1

QUARK
1. Open Quark
2. Font shows ok
3. Does not print, postscript error
4. Can create a PDF ok
5. Disable SUITCASE extensions in Extensions Manager
6. Restart Classic
7 Prints ok

Quark
1. out of the blue, I choose for example Garamond and it cannot display EVEN though both Suitcase shows it activated. Also, ATM DELUXE shows it activiated (which is should since the "bridge" enables it in ATM.)
2. Close the document
3. don't save changes
4. open the document
5. the correct font shows up for a second
6. and then it disappears.
7. Disable SUITCASE extensions in Extensions Manager
8. Restart Classic
9 Prints ok



Quark
1. Can print out a document fine to a postscipt printer. font looks good.
2. Can't create a PDF, stating the "font is missing"
3. But it was not missing when printed to the postscript level 3 printer. Or even level 2.
4. Disable SUITCASE extensions in Extensions Manager
5. Restart Classic
6 Prints ok

Has anyone used Fontreserve? This is getting ridiculous.

G4, DP1GIG, 1 GIG RAM, OSX 10.2.4
 
Odd. Garamond is one of the fonts which behaves weird for us too. It won't print or postscript the semi-bold (reg & Italic) faces in the font. Note that if I convert document fonts to paths (in Freehand 10), both PDFing and printing works fine.

All fonts work fine from InDesign 2 though, especially since it has an inbuilt Distiller engine.

NOTE: Distiller won't cause ATM Deluxe in classic to auto-activate fonts (Adobe REMOVED this ability in version 4, for some reason). Only apps like Quark will. Unfortunately Distiller is the only thing we use classic for. Roll on OSX native Distiller!
 
After weeks of pulling my hair out in frustration, today I finally happened upon the solution that fixes the PDF'ing in Classic problem.

The solution is to edit or make altered versions of all the default Distiller job options so they embed all fonts, and not just subset them (this adds only a fraction to the overall document size), and to put all the Base 14 fonts on the never embed list. I don't know why either of these options makes the difference, but I can now PDF correctly, so who cares?!!

I have attached a zip archive of the tweaked job options so that others can use them straight away.

Thanks to all those that have contributed to this discussion.
 
AAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

As the observant reader may have deduced, it would appear that my afore-mentioned fix does not cure all my font issues.

While it does appear to access all the core font faces now, Semi-bolds, and semi-bold Italics do not distill correctly, and are substitutes with there non-semi equivalent.

I give up! Roll on Distiller 6.0!!
 
Has any of you tried removing some of your system fonts, I don't seem to be having those problems.

I've cut down my classic fonts folder to:
Adobe sans mm
Adobe serif mm
charcoal
chicago
geneva
monaco

Removed helvetica.dfont from my system/library/fonts/

Gill sans, Garamond and helvetica tend to give the most problems.

Running suitcase 10 for today versus font reserve for the past two weeks and it's behaved itself impeccably, font reserve crashed illustrator on every file open.

Nialler
 
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