Printing Tests:
Possible Bug with Preview.app when printing the Metafun Manual in PDF
[ http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/metafun-p.pdf ]

Results of Printing Tests

Members of the Mac OS X TeX mailing list and the ConTeXt mailing list were asked to do tests and submit the results on a survey form
Printing was done from Preview.app on Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3 as well as from Acrobat/Reader on other platforms for comparison.
The results of the survey are available here.

Revealing the Bug in Preview.app

As an example, page 38 was extracted from the manual. This page prints perfectly with Acrobat/Reader on Mac, PC, and Linux platforms,
but is blurred/fuzzy when printed from Preview.app.

To reveal the bug, William Adams created another version of this pdf file as described below: 

          Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 19:07:31 -0500
          From: William Adams   
          Reply-To: TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List  
          To: MacOSX-TeX@email.esm.psu.edu
          Subject: [OS X TeX] Metafun manual Preview bug isolated
          
          I've managed to create a .pdf which shows this bug on-screen. Sorry I
          didn't think of that before, just saved pg. 38 as a PostScript print job
          from Preview, then distilled w/ Acrobat Distiller w/ the Prinergy Refiner.
          
          The problem seems to be the creation of bitmaps (three of them, 144 dpi)
          on top of the vector text and graphics.
          ...
          
          William
page38_adams
[ click on image to enlarge ]
[ jpg ]   [ pdf ] 		The image is a scanned copy of the modified pdf of page 38, 001-page38_adams.pdf,
which was opened with Acrobat Reader and printed from a Linux machine.

The same file printed from Preview.app does not reveal the black areas
but the parts of the captions are fuzzy, where (possibly) the transparent part of the image
overlaps the text.

See email notes by William Adams, Ross Moore. and Gerben Wierda.

Claus Gerhardt wrote: 
On 02.03.2004, at 21:53, Claus Gerhardt wrote:

The problem isn't caused by a printer: I did print p.37 to a file as 
ps and then transformed the ps file via pstopdf (gs 8). The pdf file 
was blurred if the ps initiating application was Preview (%%Creator: 
(Preview: cgpdftops CUPS filter)) but it was fine if Acrobat had been 
for the printing to a ps file (%%Creator: (Acrobat: pictwpstops filter 
1.0)).

As a follow-up: the culprit seems to be cgpdftops. When I used pdf2ps 
to obtain the ps file and then performed as before ps2pdf the final pdf 
file okay.

Claus

Siep Kroonenberg (Survey #05) was able to get good output by printing the file
indirectly via Linux
"print-to-file CUPS backend; resulting pdf printed on a Linux system
with CUPS v1.1.20 on a DeskJet 890C"

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March 6, 2004