problem with some letters printing incorrectly in PDF

[sallybauthor]

I am using Scribus version 1.5.8. I have a long novel set in Deja Vu Serif with one problem that crops up only with printing from the PDF, both at home and at the commercial printer: capital letters T, L, K, M, and N (M and N are the worst: see attachment) print incorrectly in Deja Vu Serif Italic. All other letters are fine.

I embedded the Deja Vu Serif Book and Deja Vu Serif Italic fonts in the .sla document for generating the PDF, so I don't understand why the capital italic letters aren't printing correctly.

The rest of the PDF generation settings are per IngramSpark specs for black-and-white text (600 ppi for B&W line art, grayscale color space, embedding all fonts). The only discrepancy is that I-S wants PDF/X1a:2001, and I have tried both PDF1.3 and PDF1.4. I've tried compressing graphics and not compressing graphics.

What else can I do to solve this problem?

[PatJr]

sorry I dunno
maybe open the font in fontforge or similar and see if there is anything hinky in the font for those characters?

just as a test maybe you could switch to a different font and see if the results are the same, something generic like Times Roman

please do report back what you figure this out

[Aleks100]

1. Dejavu fonts are true type fonts. It is better to use fonts defined with postscript curves.
https://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Curve-Types/
2. According to recent posts from developers Scribus 1.5.9.svn is very close to 1.6 final version so perhaps you could try that one.
3. Try printing to Adobe pdf "printer". You need Adobe Acrobat for this.

[AdmFubar]

I've noticed from the example that it only does this in italics. Is that assumption correct?