System font not accessible from PostScript

Question

Level 1

4 points

System font not accessible from PostScript

Fontbook shows that I have the font Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold in /System/Library/Fonts/HelveticaNeue.dfont. It has, according to Fontbook, the PostScript name HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold. So far, so good.

Create a simple PostScript program.

%!

/HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold 24 selectfont

36 36 moveto

(This is in HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold.) show

showpage

In Adobe Distiller, both version 8 and version XI, this reports

%%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: findfont ]%%

Preview reports differently:

Converting the PostScript file “20141022_HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold.ps” produced the following warnings:

· HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold not found, using Courier.

Please, is there anything I can do to make this font visible to PostScript?

(In the big cats this font worked fine in PostScript. It stopped working in Mavericks, as reported here.)

OS X 10.10; mid-2011 27-inch iMac with 20G memory; Adobe Distiller XI Pro 11.0.09 (12/09/2014); Preview 8 (859). There are lots of fonts installed — but that number worked fine in a feline OS.

iMac

Posted on Oct 22, 2014 2:00 PM

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Answer 1

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 22, 2014 2:40 PM in response to jdaw1

Submitted as bug 18742156.

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Answer 2

jdaw1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Oct 25, 2014 9:55 AM in response to jdaw1

I have had this font for most of a decade — one of about 2k installed fonts. Did most people have this font prior to Mavericks? If not, could the problem be that? Perhaps there was at installation a clash; perhaps the OS expects the newer version but finds the older version? I don’t know: these are hypotheses.

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Answer 3

Aug 27, 2015 12:16 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.

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