🚀 go-pugleaf

We have discovered (the hard way) a very serious bug in Cricket Draw which
greatly hampers its usefulness to us. Hopefully, this article will save
others time and grief... The basic problem is that Cricket Draw does not
work with non-resident printer fonts from Adobe. Here's the whole story, as
best I can figure out: We have several LaserWriter-Plus's, and a Linotype
L300. The L300 only has the basic set of LaserWriter fonts: Times,
Helvetica, Courier and Symbol. Additional fonts (like Palatino) can be
purchased from Adobe and either loaded into the L300's memory, or stored on
it's internal hard disk. We have invested several thousand dollars into
fonts from Adobe - we have many beyond the LW+ set, like Goudy, Garamond and
Baskerville.

The problem stems from Adobe's font protection schemes. Adobe protects its
fonts on three levels: first is the Mac disks that the fonts come on are
copy protected. Next, fonts are initialized to a specific printer, which
keys them to the printer serial number, so once initialized, the font can
only be used on that printer. Finally, there is special code built into
PostScript which is intended to prevent you from extracting the spline
descriptions of "protected" fonts (conceivably, if this weren't there, you
could get by the other forms of copy protection by loading the fonts, and
then sucking them back out).

It is this last form of copy protection that screws up Cricket Draw.
Apparently, it tries to perform some operation on the fonts (like
pathforall) which could conceivably be used to extract the font description.
On fonts purchased from Adobe, this causes an "invalid access" PostScript
error, and the file cannot be printed. This is particularly annoying with
pictures using fonts like Palatino - they can be printed fine on the LW+
(because the font is built in), but cannot be printed on the L300.
Presumably, using downloaded fonts on the LaserWriter will cause the same
problem.

I talked to Cricket technical support, and they claim there is no way for
them to fix this, and the problem is Adobe's. The only solution they could
offer is to buy fonts from somebody other than Adobe (they're the only one
using this hairy protection scheme, apparently). It's a little late for
that, and besides, Adobe has the fonts we need. Looks like Illustrator
wins... Too bad, as Cricket Draw is a nice easy program to whip up simple
drawings with.

		Mike Blackwell
		The Robotics Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University
		ARPA: mkb@rover.ri.cmu.edu
		Phone: 412-268-8830