See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ghostscript/+bug/314018 If one prints from OpenOffice.org, the application produces PostScript data. Ubuntu Intrepid uses a PDF printing workflow and therefore CUPS converts it to PDF using Ghostscript. The bold letters appear completely distorted on the printout. To prove that really the PS->PDF conversion of GS is the culprit (and not for example the printer driver) simply print to a file from OpenOffice.org (with the "Generic Printer", if this printer does not appear, stop CUPS and restart OpenOffice.org) and then do ps2pdf out.ps out.pdf shows the distorted bold text. I attach a sample PostScript file generated with OpenOffice.org. So you can also test without having OpenOffice.org handy. The text is completely distorted with GS 8.63. It comes out normal instead of bold with GS 8.64 (HEAD of SVN), so there is still a fix needed for 8.64.
Created attachment 4679 [details] openoffice-bold-ps-output.ps PostScript output of OpenOffice.org (print to file), with bold text
Created attachment 4680 [details] ps2pdf-gs-864.pdf Output of the command line GS_LIB=Resource/Init/ bin/gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -sOutputFile=ps2pdf-gs-864.pdf openoffice-bold-ps-output.ps executed in the source directory of Ghostscript, current SVN snapshot, after compiling. Originally bold letters are not bold any more.
Created attachment 4681 [details] ps2pdf-gs-863.pdf Output of ps2pdf openoffice-bold-ps-output.ps ps2pdf-gs-863.pdf on an Ubuntu Intrepid system with Ghostscript 8.63. GS 8.63 was rebuilt without the CJK patches. So the problem is not caused by the CJK patches. The originally bold text is completely distorted.
As I did not install 8.64 yet, I do not know whether the complete distortion is caused by the way how ps2pdf or /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstopdf call Ghostscript or whether most of the problem is already fixed in 8.64 and only a "last polish" is needed.
Now I have also tested with an installed Ghostscript 8.64, so that I could actually use ps2pdf. This gives the same result as my test with the GS 8.64 in the source tree. The originally bold font comes out readable but not bold.
Created attachment 4683 [details] results.tif Till, I've taken a look at this, and I don't see a problem. Probably I'm missing something obvious. The 8.63 output exhibits the well known (to me) issue with incorrect stroke widths, there have been a number of fixes in this area, and I thought this was now correct. I agree that the text in 8.64 does not seem especially bold, but there is emboldening taking place. If you open the files in Acrobat, select some of the text, and then right-click and select properties, the dialog shows that the text has a 0.4 stroke width. That is, the text is first drawn, and then outlined with a stroke, which effectively makes it bolder. The 8.63 code got the width of the stroke incorrect. Now, I've taken your file, converted to PDF using GS (HEAD) and again using Acrobat Distiller 7. I then used the HEAD GS revision to render all three files (original PostScript and both PDF files) at 600 dpi. To my eye the results are effectively identical (there are some minor pixel differences). I've attached a screenshot here, the top window (orig.pbm) is the result of GS on the original PostScript file. The middle window (out.pbm) is the result of rendering the GS PDF file. The bottom window is the result of rendering the PDF produced by Acrobat. I also ran the PDF file you sent from 8.64 (not pictured in screen shot) and it looks identical to the other outputs. Can you explain what is wrong ?
I have checked it with Ghostscript (gv) as screen renderer now. The input and output really look identical now. Poppler (renderer of evince) seems to have bug here.
Thanks Till, glad to hear its OK.
This is a duplicate of bug #689970. Marking as such. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 689970 ***