Graphic designer designs cheque. For the design to be signed off he/she includes 'lorem ipsum' placeholder text for the special numbers at the bottom.
Design gets signed off, a template is made for the programmers to use.
In the code a third party library is used to make it 'easy' to create a PDF. This process consists of opening the template, adding a line of text to it and printing it as a PDF to another file, ready for the printer.
A little while later the graphic designer edits the template to make a few amends. The file is re-saved, this fresh copy no longer contains the fonts not in the document. The placeholder text having long gone, the font for it is not saved. The other fonts for the cheque are, they moved across and were catered for by the software in the updated template.
The software runs exactly as before, just the template file has been updated. However now the font is not found unless installed or cached on the computer or printer.
The programmer never had to embed the font, his/her third party library abstracted that requirement away. The programmer had worked with the library before and knew that it was best to use Helvetica because PDF knows that is a built in and therefore does not need to bloat the document with the default fonts. Any other font would add megabytes to the document. So there was probably no oversight by the programmer.
However there may have been a micro-manager that was 'responsible' for micro-managing the update to the template. This probably involved meetings and conference calls and deadlines for 'the project' on the whiteboard. Not wishing to overstretch programmer resources, the micro-manager took it on himself to make sure the programmer was not 'interrupted' so he got another lackey to upload the new cheque template. This all worked fine initially.
Had there not been a micro-manager then the graphic designer would have had to have worked with the programmer, without the micro-manager or his lackey. The programmer would have picked up on the smaller file size as this would be a noticeable change. Instinctively the programmer would have made a test run and, not having fonts on his/her dev box, would have detected the problem right away. Meanwhile, the lackey with no knowledge of things like version control just uploaded the template as told, blindly unaware of the requirements to 'check your work'.
Why didn't the micro-manager check that the font wasn't embedded? That is what I want to know.
Graphic designer designs cheque. For the design to be signed off he/she includes 'lorem ipsum' placeholder text for the special numbers at the bottom.
Design gets signed off, a template is made for the programmers to use.
In the code a third party library is used to make it 'easy' to create a PDF. This process consists of opening the template, adding a line of text to it and printing it as a PDF to another file, ready for the printer.
A little while later the graphic designer edits the template to make a few amends. The file is re-saved, this fresh copy no longer contains the fonts not in the document. The placeholder text having long gone, the font for it is not saved. The other fonts for the cheque are, they moved across and were catered for by the software in the updated template.
The software runs exactly as before, just the template file has been updated. However now the font is not found unless installed or cached on the computer or printer.
The programmer never had to embed the font, his/her third party library abstracted that requirement away. The programmer had worked with the library before and knew that it was best to use Helvetica because PDF knows that is a built in and therefore does not need to bloat the document with the default fonts. Any other font would add megabytes to the document. So there was probably no oversight by the programmer.
However there may have been a micro-manager that was 'responsible' for micro-managing the update to the template. This probably involved meetings and conference calls and deadlines for 'the project' on the whiteboard. Not wishing to overstretch programmer resources, the micro-manager took it on himself to make sure the programmer was not 'interrupted' so he got another lackey to upload the new cheque template. This all worked fine initially.
Had there not been a micro-manager then the graphic designer would have had to have worked with the programmer, without the micro-manager or his lackey. The programmer would have picked up on the smaller file size as this would be a noticeable change. Instinctively the programmer would have made a test run and, not having fonts on his/her dev box, would have detected the problem right away. Meanwhile, the lackey with no knowledge of things like version control just uploaded the template as told, blindly unaware of the requirements to 'check your work'.
Why didn't the micro-manager check that the font wasn't embedded? That is what I want to know.