[tex-k] Possible bug in dvips?

[Karl Berry]

    Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 03:23:41 +0000
    http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-k/2017-August/002800.html

    On texlive 2017, Windows 10. Compile the attached .tex via dvi -> ps
    -> pdf with the following options:

    dvips.exe -Ppdf -G0 -tletter -o %.ps %.dvi
    ps2pdf.exe -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 %.ps

Thanks for the report.
Coming back to this after a mere 5+ months (many apologies) ... sadly,
I cannot reproduce the problem (on Unix, but that shouldn't
matter). Please check that you were running:
  dvips(k) 5.997 Copyright 2017 Radical Eye ...

Or maybe your dvips is set up differently, to use the host fonts instead
of the URW Nimbus fonts that come with TL? If you can look at the
test.ps file that was generated by your dvips, maybe more can be discerned.

At any rate, clearly the issue is that the IEEE author name is being set
in Times Italic, and the figure caption also uses (literally)
/Times-Italic. That is, the figure is relying on the "host" fonts, they
aren't embedded in the .eps. However, in my dvips output, the "Member,
IEEE" is not literally using /Times-Italic, but rather the URW font (and
under a unique name besides), therefore there is no conflict and the Q
in the caption appears.

So another workaround would be to make the figure file be
self-contained, one way or another.

In general the dvips output should not contain font references to the 35
standard fonts, possibly conflicting with fonts used in figures. There
have been bugs in this area before, and it's certainly possible that
some remain, but I don't see it yet :( ... --thanks again, karl.