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Level 1

4 points

Fonts exist but not visible from PostScript, since Mavericks

In Font Book there is a font, one amongst several thousand, called Arial Unicode MS, with one sub-type, Regular. Clicking on this shows the PostScript name to be ArialUnicodeMS.

Likewise, there is a font Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold, with PostScript name HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold.

Pre-Mavericks, I could create a PostScript file containing a line such as

/ArialUnicodeMS 48 selectfont

and that worked. That worked with Preview, that worked with Adobe Distiller 8.

But since upgrading to Mavericks it doesn’t work, both Distiller 8 and XI both reporting “ArialUnicodeMS not found, using Courier.” Mavericks Preview doesn’t report, but also uses Courier. These fonts have ceased to work in PostScript.

But these fonts exist. They are visible in Font Book; they can be used in Microsoft Word. So why have they ceased to be visible to PostScript? Please, how can they become PostScript-visible again?

iMac

Posted on Feb 13, 2014 7:58 AM

18 replies

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,314 points

Feb 14, 2014 2:56 PM in response to jdaw1

Not seeing that one particular Helvetica face sure sounds like an OS bug to me. Especially when your same scripts worked previous to 10.9.x. You could report it to Apple as a bug.

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Feb 14, 2014 3:13 PM in response to Kurt Lang

Submitted: bug # 16074757.

Aug 27, 2015 12:17 PM in response to jdaw1

Have you heard more on this? Just ran into a similar issue. I am actually a developer and we are trying to address some PostScript generation issues in our app. As I have explored this more, the problem seems fairly wide spread. A simple PostScript program like the one above is failing for usually the same reason for about 93 of a total of 415 fonts on my 10.9.5 system. At first I thought it was just OpenType PostScript fonts, but while many of those do fail, some do not. And there are fonts of other kinds that also fail. In my research so far on this, the problem seems to have gotten worse in 10.9.

Fonts exist but not visible from PostScript, since Mavericks