On 23-Jul-01 Alex Thomas wrote:

Got a Brother HL1670N printer here which works well using SuSE 7.2 and CUPS. Just wondering whether I should try and use its built-in fonts rather than PS fonts that ship with SuSE (and GIMP). I think the printer's fonts resemble well-known ones but are called things like:

Alaska Antique Oakland Atlanta BermudaScript Brougham Brussels Cleveland Connecticut Copenhagen Germany (a Fraktur font) Guatemala Helsinki Letter Gothic Maryland Oklahoma Portugal San Diego Tennessee

Is it worth trying to use them? Would they be better quality than downloaded PS fonts? Why don't Brother ship .pfm etc. files for them? Seems like I'd have to add them as aliases to existing font tables or something. Any tips appreciated!

My Brother HL1070 does somneting very similar. I haven't fully sussed it out, but it's pretty clear that it uses fonts such as those listed above with a built-in alias for the standard Adobe font family names. So you shouldn't need to use any embedded fonts provided you invoke the standard Adobe font names. You certainly don't need to make your own aliases. You can get a "Test sanmple page" printed out by holding down buttons while you switch on (see your printer manual), and this will show you what many of these fonts looks like, by printing their namea. I've done a visual comparison, and (on my HL1070) it seems that the correspondence is as follows: Adobe Brother ================== ===================== AvantGarde Atlanta Bookman Brussels Courier Brougham Helvetica Helsinki Helvetica-Narrow Helsinki-Narrow NewCenturySchoolbook Copenhagen [? not too sure of this one] Palatino Portugal Symbol BR Symbol Times Tennessee ZapfChanceryMedItalic CalgaryMediumItalic ZapfDingbats BR Dingbats The result of this is that if you have any PostScript file which uses only the names of fonts from the left-hand column, you can send it to the Brother printer and it will print it using the corrsponding fonts from the right-hand column. You can of course use its other built-in fonts as well, but as you say you're a touch stuck since you don't know what their AFMs are. However, if you want to see them all (the "test sample page" only prints a selection) you can try injecting a raw PS file straight into the printer (NO filtering), on the lines of %!PS-Adobe-3.0 /Times-Roman findfont 12 scalefont setfont 72 600 moveto (the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog) show 72 580 moveto (THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG) show /Tennessee-Roman findfont 12 scalefont setfont 72 560 moveto (the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog) show 72 540 moveto (THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG) show /Alaska findfont 12 scalefont setfont 72 520 moveto (the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog) show 72 500 moveto (THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG) show showpage and so on (as many fonts as you like). Notice how Times-Roman and Tennessee-Roman come out the same ... (but not quite identical to true Adobe Times-Roman). Also, if you poke around on the Brother Web site (under support and the like) you'll come across a lot of interesting stuff, including PDF documents about the Printer Job Language and the like. Also try to find a very interesting file called "brhl1070.ppd" (or its equivalent for your model), which gives you a lot of low-down on the internals of BrotherScript. also other files ... Good hunting! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 23-Jul-01 Time: 23:00:58 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------