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Document 269
Fonts preview but don't print correctly
Version: 3.0 - Scientific WorkPlace & Scientific Word
Problem
The fonts in my document preview just fine, but when I print, certain
characters appear as small boxes or don't appear at all.
Explanation
The symptoms suggest that the problem is with your Windows print driver. If
a symbol or character typeset previews correctly, but does not print
correctly, then your Windows screen driver is correctly handling the
characters, which are bound to have Unicode values greater than 255 in the
font in use, but your Windows print driver is not. Unfortunately, although
Microsoft claims that Windows 95 correctly displays Unicode characters, many
printer hardware manufacturers have Windows drivers that don't fully support
this Windows 95 feature.
Solution
There are several possible solutions to the problem.
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Find a driver for your printer that works correctly. Updated drivers are
often posted on the manufacturer's web site. In many cases, we've found that
drivers for other printer models from the same manufacturer will work, but
this is a matter of experimentation.
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Switch to a printer with a driver that is known to be good. We realize this is
a drastic solution, but some manufacturers are doing an excellent job with
their drivers. We've found that Windows NT drivers are much better than
Windows 95 drivers, because Windows NT absolutely requires Unicode
compliance.
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Switch to a TeX Previewer that doesn't use Unicode. Unicode is used in the new
TrueTeX previewer because it allows the support of new features in packages
such as Omegathis includes support for all languages, include Chinese,
Japanese, etc. Unicode is the only viable solution here. The older 16-bit
TrueTeX previewer (the one in Version 2.5) doesn't use Unicode, nor does the
public domain MikTeX previewer.
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Try finding a setting on the Windows print driver control panel that
downloads all fonts to the printer using bitmaps. This takes the Windows
print driver out of the loop and uses the screen driver to rasterize the
fonts instead. We can't give specific instructions here because every printer
driver setup is different.
Revised 06/11/02
This document was created with Scientific WorkPlace.
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