R C-R wrote:
I hate to be the one to keep mentioning it, but even just considering only your & etrosoft's descriptions of the problem & how to reproduce it, the two do not seem to be completely in agreement. Considering the wider range of reports, things get much more complicated in a hurry, & they cannot all be due to user error or lack of clarity in their descriptions. For instance, for some the problem is intermittent, or can be cleared at least temporarily by emptying caches, or affects only some OT PS fonts. For others, none of these things are true.
Maybe all these things are somehow manifestations of the same basic bug. But until the "somehow" & all its implications are understood by Apple (probably with the cooperation of Adobe & possibly with other vendors) we won't see a fix. Otherwise, the fix is likely to break something else, & it might be even harder to fix that.
What I see is that I create an rtf file using one of the "accursed" fonts, and save a pdf file from it, then that particular pdf file is broken or works, and its behavior doesn't change. But I can take the exact same rtf file and write it out multiple times, without rebooting, and the different pdf files produced from the same rtf file will be broken in different ways.
This has all of the hallmarks of one of those "I'm using memory I don't actually own for something important, and some other process -- the one that really owns the memory -- is randomly sticking stuff in there" bugs.
If my guess is right, that kind of bug can be REALLY hard to find...
(I've been a programmer long enough that this is one of those occasions where I'm mostly just grateful that it's not MY fault!)