Print issue - randomly missing glyphs

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1

Hello.

One of my clients just found the issue with randomly missing glyphs during the printing. Let me explain the situation what happened.

In the past I used to create simply TrueType version of my fonts and there were no issue with printing at all. Last month I updated some of my fonts to OpenType where I tried to add some special features. The fonts were tested in Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, seemed to work fine. BUT suddenly when my client tried to print PDF (created in InDesign) in print shop some of the glyphs disapeared (or might be replaced by empty spaces) even the PDF contain all text. Here is the screenshot of one of the page (graphic novel re-lettered in Czech language).
15mfspw.png
On the left hand side you can see how it is looks in InDesign / exported PDF = no issue. On the right hand side you can see that some of parts of the text are missing. Not just 1 specific glyph, actually whole lines or text strings. I should note that all of missing parts contain one or more of these glyphs - aacute, eacute, iacute, yacute. Hm, issue with diacritics? Well, you can see that some of the printed text still contains those letters…


This bug is not in all fonts, only in 2 of them. One of those fonts is actually 2nd version of OpenType. The 1st version worked without any issues. So I tried to find what is the different, what is common and what I probably did wrong and… well… I am not sure if I found it but there is the screenshot of the decompiled scripts from OTFs.
2rhwvb4.png
The first one contains latn and the second one on the right hand side contains DFLT. Could this cause the issue with missing glyphs during printing? Did some of you guys find this kind of issue? Can you support me with this problem?

Thank you for advice.

P.S. I use FontCreator 8.0 Professional.

2

I don’t think those OpenType layout features are causing the problem, but if you suspect it, why don’t you export the font without OpenType layout features and try if that works?

So many things can be the problem, so it might be better if you provide more information, or send us the font(s).

3

Next week I am planning to do more deeper investigation and trials with my client, especially to try to print sample pages with my fonts in (at least) two different print shops to be able see which ones are OK and which ones are not OK. I will let you know my findings.

4

This may or may not be of interest.

There is a desktop publishing application called Scribus, it is free and open source. It is available at http://www.scribus.net/

What is relevant to this discussion is that it does very thorough testing of all the fonts on your system before it allows you to use them in Scribus, it is very picky and pedantic, it can detect most things which might be wrong with a font.

If a font passes the Scribus test then it will probably be OK for any print shop and any application.