Offending command: show

‘Show’ is used in PostScript for the handling of text. This means that there is somewhere a piece of text or a font on your page that misbehaves.

Solutions

  • My best guess would be to COPY the entire content of the page and PASTE it onto a fresh page in a new document.
  • If the PostScript error is ‘limitcheck’ then a graphic on the page is too complex for the RIP. Increase flatness, split paths, simplify the graphic or lower the resolution of the RIP to solve the problem.
  • If you try to distill files containing early versions of either Optima or Eras, Distiller 3.x may throw up the following message:

%%[Warning: unable to embed font /Optima. Out of memory. Error: rangecheck; Offending Command: show – Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%

This error will not show up with Distiller 4.x and it can also be fixed by using a more recent version of the fonts. In fact, the error is apparently caused by the fact that early versions of Optima and Eras contained two set of data: one for high resolution devices and one for low resolution ones. Adobe did this to improve the quality of the very detailed curves in these fonts. Later on, they used other algorithm and such hybrid fonts disappeared off the market.

One thought on “Offending command: show

  1. Thank you! Your explanation helped me confirm that a problem in my database was limited to one specific record.

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