PHP, PostScript and ATM Fonts

Tags: pecl, php, postscript, linux, gentoo

Recently, I’ve been expermenting with PHP’s PS functions – the PECL extension that allows you to directly output PostScript from your scripts. There are other projects that come to mind (html2ps is another one that will render to PostScript) but I wanted somsething more tightly intergrated into my script.

Mysteriously, when I went to install my scripts on the new Poweredge I bought, I began to get there strange errrors:

ps_findfont() [function.ps-findfont]: PSlib warning: Trying to insert the glyph ‘.notdef’ which already exists. Please check your afm file for duplicate glyph names.

I couldn’t understand what was going on – it was working fine on the previous server. After googling about the web and wracking my brains for about two hours, I checked the versions of PSlib  installed on the two servers. Both were masked by Gentoo’s Portage system, but the unmasked version on the previous server was 0.2.6, whereas the one on the new server was 0.4.1. After I masked out 0.4.1 (thanks to Gentoo’s awesome package.mask) and downgraded back to 0.2.6, everything began working again.

So there you have it. Apparently the PECL PS extension is not completely compatible with the most recent version of PSlib, and downgrading back seems to work. Hope this helps somebody!