Topic awaiting preservation: Stumped no hypens? (Page 1 of 1)

Hi there!
I have a question that I am hoping someone could possibly shed some light on…
Let me see if I can explain…

I am having problems with hyphens. They do not display on the proofs generated by our professional printer (out sourced professional printer – “vendor” for our agency).

Here is the scoop…
My original file is a .qxd (quark) doc. I am using Adobe postscript fonts – PC format. The culprit “Helvetica - BOLD”. For some reason all of our hyphens drop out of our blue lines/ serpa printouts. My printer is confused and has been in a number of times to discuss the issue.

I don’t know if this will help – we are PC, I use ATM (Adobe Type Manager) to manage my PostScript fonts (turn them off and on). From the onset when I begin creating my documents the default font for quark is Arial (ttf) – I change this to Helvetica (ps -through the tool bar selector) - my client is particular to having the body text be in this format so I must continue using these fonts but it is beginning to be a headache. I am sure there is some one out there that works in a print shop that might be able to help. I know this question is quite abstract – but I am really search for an answer (so is our print vendor). This problem only exists w/the hyphens – they just disappear (consistently – this has happened on many projects now).

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance…

I'm going to assume that you provide your fonts on disc to your printer when you send them the files to output. That being said, it sounds like your font has gotten corrupted perhaps. Try re-installing the Helvetica family and provide them with the original copy of Helvetica. Couldn't hurt. We've had that problem in the past with Helvetica Black and apostrophes. We didn't provide them with a copy of Helvetica and for some reason, their Helvetica didn't recognize our apostrophes. Once they loaded our Helvetica when opening our files, it went away.

Good luck.

If hyphens are appearing on screen OK at the vender. Then I would supect the font cash on there RIP needs to flushed. If the RIP thinks it alreay has Helv-Bold then It will not download a new copy. So it could be bad there as well. Sometime even when told to do so from print driver.

The only other thing I can think of would very weird, but if you happen to have white or light colored type on a darker colored background, trapping could effect serfs, arms, and other small aspects of type such as hyphens and periods. If this is happening I would also be worried about the dot gain on the press run causing the same or worse problem.

I see similar trapping issues with type appear bolded over white backgrounds when the text box is touching more then one tinted box that exist higher in the stack order then the background. Quark traps the whole text box the same, and it will auto trap to the colored box and expanding the stroke on the text. ( Manual setting of the trap needed to be adjusted, which is best left up to the printer.)

Otherwise Jeni suggestions sound fruit full.

J. Stuart J.

[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 06-06-2003).]

Great ideas! I will forward your suggestions on to our vendor.
Thanks so much...