printing font scale issues

[Duane Clark]

Dan Engel wrote:
> 
> I'm using Wine-20010510 to run Quickbooks.  Printing seems to work okay, as
> long as I use the "default" forms.
> 
> When I try to modify the defaults, by changing the fonts on parts of forms,
> the printed result is that the font is tiny.  For example, 18-pt Helvetica
> looks printed out like 4-point Helvetica (or maybe even smaller!)
> 
> Is there something in the configuration that I missed, perhaps, about
> printer fonts?  I have pointers to the afm directories (and have tried
> several different--both those that came with my system, Mandrake 7.2, and
> those I downloaded from Adobe.)
> 
> Thanks,
> -Dan Engel

I recently spent a day or so fighting with fonts. I had an application
that was trying to use Helvetica as a scaled (and sometimes rotated)
font. Depending on the scale level, I would get a very small helvetica
font, or sometimes a small italic helvetica, not to mention rotation
never worked.

After some digging, I found that this was a due to a combination of my
helvetica font being a bit mapped (PCF) font, and the wine mechanism
used for selecting a font when there is not an exact match.

The fix was really easy in my case. My application was asking for a MS
SansSerif font (which I don't have installed), and the wine config file
had the line:
"DefaultSansSerif" = "-adobe-helvetica-"
I changed that to:
"DefaultSansSerif" = "-microsoft-tahoma-"
And everything, including font rotation and scaling, works perfectly now
(tahoma is a TrueType font that I had previously installed).

So I think the solution in your case will be to try to replace the
helvetica with a TrueType font. I think Type1 fonts might also work.
Verdana is another SanSerif font that you could substitute for
helvetica. Or perhaps look for a TrueType helvetica font.

Duane