by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/08/31, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/08/31/10203390.aspx
The question was an interesting one:
Query raised by client:
In the last fortnight, some business unit cannot print office document correctly if the document contains Calibri font. The initial thought was to upgrade to the latest version of driver from the printer vendor but it did not resolve the issue. Searching the Internet, I found the following article which appears to resolve the issue but I don't know why. The article has no connection to the problem when reading it initially:
They are using Windows XP SP3 with Office 2007 or Office 2010. We have packaged the above kb article but we are a bit uncertain to deploy it without knowing the root cause of the issue, I tried to reproduce the issue but could not reproduce it in the lab. The printing problem is affecting a few hundred users and it could be higher as the problem is hidden for most users if the user do not print document with Calibri font. I hope you could refer this question to someone in Microsoft who could give us an explanation of why the above article seems to fix the issue.
Customer wants to know how exactly the workaround mentioned in the kb article resolves this issue. Does the workaround updates Calibri Font?
Any help is highly appreciated.
There are several things going on here:
First of all, the KB article itself is referring to a completely unrelated issue that happens to provide a workaround for both problems.
Second of all, the KB article fix does not provide an update for Calibri.
Third of all, I have talked about many fixes that complex script provides, all of which seem unrelated, like IsComplexEnoughForYou? and IsCrAndLfComplex or what? and What happens when you involve an unenabled Uniscribe with vertical text, given that Uniscribe doesn't handle vertical text? and so on.
That Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai) option helps empower many fonts with OpenType features like the C* fonts to behave properly in a large number of circumstances. This is in fact one of the main reasons that the setting was changed to be "always on" in Vista -- to avoid the random problems that the setting being turned on fixes...
Fourth of all, I continue to be surprised by how often people will look at three different pieces of the technology puzzle:
and mix and match them in ways that cause situations that were never anticipated when the technology originally shipped to be commonplace.
Like using C* fonts when the OS doesn't have complex script support turned on (you can probably think of other examples)....
Fifth of all, I suspect the reason that some problems occur in printing but not on the screen is different Uniscribe versions -- like the private version used by Office versus the one used by lower level print operations (or perhaps most strikingly when the latter Uniscribe is turned off -- since complex script support is).
Sixth of all, I suspect this is a reasonable situation to consider an Office 2007/2010 bug.
After adding all of those fonts, why wouldn't Office install complex script support too?
To avoid these kinds of issues entirely....