Guns is talking about a known problem from at least 20 years ago when printers would accept ads from amateur graphic artists who created their ads using fonts downloaded from who-knew-where. These fonts were often named the same as genuine Adobe fonts and ignorant printers/layout people would load the ad into Pagemaker/Quark and also load the included fonts. These would overwrite the original font files with the same named fonts. The ones coming in with the ads were a mess.
I had one published that had a magazine, almost ready for print where all-of-the-sudden, every page had ONE character per page in their body documents, after loading the ads. They were at a loss. As their contract IT guy, I was called in. It was a corrupted Time Roman font. The kerning metric table had been replaced by some amateur with one that literally had the equivalent over a thousand spaces of space between characters. LOL! Why? Who knows. But it resulted in only one character per page. I went through their font folder and found over 80% of their fonts were corrupted or phony, having been replaced with fakes over the years they had been bringing in ads and just installing them into the final copy of the magazine. We had to buy the complete set of Adobe Fonts ($499 per Mac times 15 macs, IIRC) and re-install the fonts, to correct the issue before they could safely go to press! I instituted the rule that ONLY specified Adobe fonts in ads were to be accepted. . . and if someone wanted a specialty fancy font, they had to submit the ad in PDF or Encapsulated Postscript and even THOSE were kept on a quarantined Mac until they were assured it was safe to move to the main file. NO MORE PROBLEMS! Whew!
Even with font problems then, Macs did far better than PCs.
I’ll go with your post except the last sentence. No noticeable difference in end result. In that respect Macs are not better, not for my money.
Yikes, what a story!!
I’ve seen so many cases of corrupted clipping paths, alpha channels, spot colors that are munged up, and on and on...
I long ago made the determination that we would only use fonts from acceptable foundries such as ITC/Monotype, Agfa, Adobe, etc., and try to use the postscript versions, although true type is getting better with their metrics and tables.
I love multiple masters way back when, and otf seemed great, but sadly, both those technologies flew by the wayside.
See ya’, Sword,
Ed