I have created a very large logo glyph. It nicely shows on screen but it wont print. However, if I divide it into serveral parts the seperate parts print ok.
Can anybody tell me how many contours and/or point a single glyph can handle?
For your information: The actual glyph consits of 1965 contours and 31487 points
Based on similar issues, I suspect the glyph is converted to postscript by the printer (or the printer driver) and as postscript has it’s limitations, it fails to print. You could try to make the glyph’s outline less complex, for example by changing curves into lines. Another option, if your printer driver offers it, is the “Print TrueType as graphics” option, try that. Let us know your results.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that postscript uses cubic Bézier curves whereas TrueType uses quadratic Bézier curves. Also that any quadratic Bézier curve can be converted to a cubic Bézier curve, though not every cubic Bézier curve can be converted to a quadratic Bézier curve.
Also, that a quadratic Bézier curve converted to a cubic Bézier curve uses more points for the curve.
So, although the glyph in the example consists of 1965 contours and 31487 points, any conversion to postscript may well increase the number of points.
I do not know whether that is significant.
William Overington
Thank you so far
I’ve tried your suggestions. They did not work.
So I divided the glyph and tried several options:
contours 906, points 3624 OK (no curves)
contours 907, points 3628 did not print (no curves)
contours 384, points 6144 OK (curves)
I made about 20 more prints with different combinations contours/type/points but could not detect any relation as far as limitations are concerned.
Any further help is being appreciated
I would have expected to see other results and have run out of ideas on this matter. In case you make more progress, do let us know.
If you can send the font to me for testing purposes I will look at it for you.
There seems to be a limitation of any kind in the printing routines.
I’ve tried several hardware printers with lots of memory and two PDF printers.
No way to get even close to what I needed. Just blank outputs but no printer error message.
So this is my work around:
I divided the logo into 8 glyphs (originally I hoped to do it with 3, one glyph for each color).
They have the following contours/points ratio:
343/2738
377/3016
341/2722
110/1760
377/3007
311/2488
22/411
1/4
I pushed the the large glyphs to the limit, printing more then 100 sheets and thus making sure that I got the most out of each glyph.
Not very elegant, but it workes.
Thanks for your support and suggestions.
I’m glad to know you’ve been able to find some kind of work-around.
I don’t know the specifics, but I know my printer prints (partial) blank pages, when it runs out of memory. It never shows an error, when this occurs.