Open Radar

 
Summary:
I'm in the process of releasing a series of novels.  With my own printer (Konica Minolta PostScript), everything looks fine, but when I sent the same PDF content to **************** (major POD firm), the output was sometimes unreadable, depending on which of their printers did the printing:

* The main body font (Linotype Didot, one of OS X's built-in fonts) was massively corrupted, with entire strokes missing.
* The title page font was rendered at several times its normal size.

While investigating this issue, I happened to try printing the book on my old Brother non-PostScript laser printer (which I rarely use), and I was able to reproduce the exact problems that **************** encountered, which tells me with near certainty that they're using CUPS, and that the bug lies somewhere in OS X's font rendering for non-PostScript printers.

Experimentally, it looks like the problem may lie in cgpdftoraster.  I added a wrapper around cgpdftoraster to dump its output to a raster file, and used RasterView, and the problems are clearly visible in its output using my original PDF as the source.

I've attached a single-page PDF file that reproduces both of these two printing issues when printed to non-PostScript printers, along with the raster file and a photo that shows the correct output from my Konica Minolta 7450 II grafx alongside the badly rasterized output from ****************.

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Print either of the attached PDFs to a non-PostScript printer.  (In my case, I was using a Brother HL-1440 attached to an Airport Base Station.)
2.  Swear.
3.  Repeat step 2.

Expected Results:
I expected glyphs to be rendered correctly.


Actual Results:
Crucial parts of many letters are missing entirely.  For example, the crossbars on the lowercase "t"s and "f"s are absent entirely.

This problem is actively costing me money, and no doubt costing **************** money as well.

Version:
This bug is reproducible in:
OS X v10.10.1
OS X v10.9.5
OS X v10.6.8

Notes:
I've verified that the lines in question don't disappear when Photoshop renders this PDF in black-and-white, even at 150 DPI (ImageWriter II resolution, give or take) so this isn't a glyph thickness issue, or at least it shouldn't be.

Configuration:
Problems appear to occur on all non-PostScript printers.