Embedded fonts (17.4) possible glitch

kaiserwilhelm

Well-known member
We have utilized the "0" on subset fonts for years. We need the fonts to be embedded.
Today we had pdfs come in that were full of subset fonts. We did testing with the original files in 17.1 and 17.4 - and the results showed that 17.4 has something going on.
Out of 40 fonts used, in 17.1, only two were subset. In 17.4, it was over 35.
*We did do a test where we changed it to 100 instead of 0 (in case Adobe reversed the number again like they did 8 years ago). In that case, it was 40/40 subset.
How do we get this information to Adobe? Anyone else seeing it? At this point, we downgraded and all of our customers are going to have to do the same.
 
Try Adobe forums. They are monitored by Adobe staff. Another avenue to try would be indesign.uservoice.com which is also monitored by Adobe staff.

Best regards,
pd
 
Try Adobe forums. They are monitored by Adobe staff. Another avenue to try would be indesign.uservoice.com which is also monitored by Adobe staff.

Best regards,
pd
THIS IS NOT A BUG TO BE REPORTED.
THIS IS A FEATURE.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT ADOBE HAS/IS CHANGING THEIR FONT HANDLING PROCESSES.
And yes I know I posted in all caps.
Been warning this forum for several years that this was happening.
 
THIS IS NOT A BUG TO BE REPORTED.
THIS IS A FEATURE.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT ADOBE HAS/IS CHANGING THEIR FONT HANDLING PROCESSES.
And yes I know I posted in all caps.
Been warning this forum for several years that this was happening.
This is a feature? Wow. It will hurt us BADLY! WHY would they take that from us! Guess we get to remain in 17.01 as long as we possibly can.
 
This is a feature? Wow. It will hurt us BADLY! WHY would they take that from us! Guess we get to remain in 17.01 as long as we possibly can.
Yes it hurts us (printers).
This goes hand in hand with removing support for type1 fonts.

Here is what I predict Adobe will do:
?Soon? INDD will ONLY use 'authorized' fonts from Adobe Cloud.
This will include any fonts you have uploaded to 'your' repository on said cloud.
Of course 'your' fonts will need to be properly licensed or they will be removed from 'your' cloud storage.
As 'your' fonts are used on your machine they are downloaded and encrypted for the time they are used and deleted when turned off on your machine.
OF COURSE you won't be able to embed the whole font in a document, silly boy!
My2Cents - YMMV
 
We have utilized the "0" on subset fonts for years. We need the fonts to be embedded.
Today we had pdfs come in that were full of subset fonts. We did testing with the original files in 17.1 and 17.4 - and the results showed that 17.4 has something going on.
Out of 40 fonts used, in 17.1, only two were subset. In 17.4, it was over 35.
*We did do a test where we changed it to 100 instead of 0 (in case Adobe reversed the number again like they did 8 years ago). In that case, it was 40/40 subset.
How do we get this information to Adobe? Anyone else seeing it? At this point, we downgraded and all of our customers are going to have to do the same.

I assume that you are referring to InDesign 17.4 since you only specified a release number and not a product!

There are at least three separate issues here:

(1) What numeric percentage setting is correct for specifying that a font is not to be subsetted when embedded in an exported PDF? (This is the Fonts setting on the Advanced tab of the Export Adobe PDF dialog in InDesign.)

To quote the InDesign Help on this topic:

Subset Fonts When Percent Of Characters Used Is Less Than — Sets the threshold for embedding complete fonts based on how many of the font’s characters are used in the document. If the percentage of characters used in the document for any given font is exceeded, then that specific font is completely embedded. Otherwise, the font is subsetted. Embedding complete fonts increases file size, but if you want to make sure you completely embed all fonts, enter 0 (zero). You can also set a threshold in the General Preferences dialog box to trigger font subsetting based on the number of glyphs a font contains.

What is key here is that there are two values you need to set.

The first value is in the Advanced tab of the Export Adobe PDF dialog; this should be set to 0 to force full font embedding. (The default value used with all the predefined Adobe PDF Presets is 100 which indicates that subsetting is to be employed unless the document actually references all the glyphs in the font.

Snag_21b4471c.png


The second value which overrides the first is in the General tab of the general InDesign Preferences. There is a setting for Font Downloading and Embedding. Always subset fonts with glyph counts greater than: where you specify the maximum number of glyphs in the font that will allowed to be fully embedded.
Depending upon how long you have used InDesign, you may find that this value may be defaulted to 1000 or 2000. Thus, if you have a font that in total has more than that number of glyphs defined, that font will always be subsetted in the PDF file. 1000 or 2000 glyphs may sound quite a large number, but with many modern fonts, that is definitely not the case. For example, many of the system fonts in Windows (including Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, and Palatino Linotype), many so-called “Pro” OpenType fonts, and even many Google fonts routinely have many thousands of such glyph definitions to accommodate numerous international character sets (including Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.). If embedding “full” fonts is that critically important to you (separate issue), then perhaps a value of 10000 might be more appropriate here.

Snag_21c2128b.png


(2) What is the expected behaviour of this setting versus the observed behaviour and is there any rhyme or reason for such behaviour?

Observing the rules from (1) above, I created a test file in InDesign using a plethora of fonts from different sources and types (pun intended) including, OpenType CFF, OpenType TTF, and TrueType fonts including some fonts with gargantuan glyph counts. Exporting PDF using the settings above resulted in all the fonts being fully embedded with one caveat. Some fonts were double embedded, first as a “full” font and secondly as a CID Identity-H encoded font (for optimization of the PDF access to certain glyphs). Unfortunately, this forum limits file size attachments and thus I could not upload the sample PDF file. However, this is a screen shot of the page:

Snag_21cf5f35.png

(If you write me, I'll gladly send you the actual 2MB PDF file!)

The only time where embedding would not occur would be if you were using certain CJK (Asian) fonts or fonts that specifically prohibited embedding in PDF (via the fsType flag in the font's OS/2 table).

(3) What practical reason is there for requesting or requiring anyone for “fully embed” any or all fonts in a PDF file exported from InDesign or for that matter any other application?

I know of no “modern” RIP or PDF workflow product that conforms in its operation to the ISO PDF specification that requires a font to be fully embedded. There are plenty of bubba missas (Yiddish for urban legends, literally grandmothers' tales) associated with whether you should or shouldn't fully embed fonts in PDF files or even PostScript files.

In fact, there are only two use cases in which fully embedding a file is either necessary or appropriate:

The first is if you have created a PDF form and want the fields to use a particular, non-system font. In that case, you really need to have the whole font embedded, not just what InDesign and most applications embed, but rather the full OpenType font including all the layout tables which are not normally embedded via layout applications. (Acrobat does embed such full OpenType fonts if possible for forms use!)

The second use case is that in which you think that you can or will subsequently “edit” the text of a PDF file and would need all the glyphs of the font to allow such editing. The fact though is that if you wish to edit text in a PDF file in Acrobat (or even, gulp, in Illustrator - a strict “no, no”) you in fact need to install that font on the system on which the editing is being done. These applications do not use the embedded font for editing. Thus, for this purpose, fully embedding the font in the PDF file won't help you one iota.

I'd be very interested in any other valid use cases one would have for fully embedding a font in a PDF file. During my 31 years at Adobe, we never saw any such use case (other than some severely broken third party RIP or PDF workflow tool).

- Dov
 
THIS IS NOT A BUG TO BE REPORTED.
THIS IS A FEATURE.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT ADOBE HAS/IS CHANGING THEIR FONT HANDLING PROCESSES.
And yes I know I posted in all caps.
Been warning this forum for several years that this was happening.

See my subsequent reply. If the threshold values are properly set, you should see no difference in the embedding. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the changes in support of Type 1 fonts.

- Dov
 
Yes it hurts us (printers).
This goes hand in hand with removing support for type1 fonts.

Here is what I predict Adobe will do:
?Soon? INDD will ONLY use 'authorized' fonts from Adobe Cloud.
This will include any fonts you have uploaded to 'your' repository on said cloud.
Of course 'your' fonts will need to be properly licensed or they will be removed from 'your' cloud storage.
As 'your' fonts are used on your machine they are downloaded and encrypted for the time they are used and deleted when turned off on your machine.
OF COURSE you won't be able to embed the whole font in a document, silly boy!
My2Cents - YMMV

Talk about paranoia!

Let's start with Type 1 font support.

To be very clear, Type 1 fonts continue to be and will always be supported in PDF (and thus Acrobat) as well as in PostScript since they are part of the specifications of those languages.

Furthermore, existing EPS and PDF content will continue to be placeable within InDesign and Illustrator documents (as well as be printed).

What is not going to be supported is editing content or creating new such content with Type 1 fonts in the Adobe applications. You should note that Microsoft Office on Windows stopped supporting Type 1 fonts (although they do support OpenType CFF fonts) in 2013.

You should be aware that if (and more precisely when) Apple stops supporting resource fork-based files (such as Type 1 fonts and old MacOS TrueType fonts use), even keeping those fonts on your system will be impossible.

And Microsoft is mulling over when they will totally stop supporting Type 1 fonts under Windows.

Workaround?

Hopefully, given two decades since OpenType CFF fonts were introduced to replace Type 1 fonts and probably well over a decade since any font vendor has licensed any Type 1 fonts, you have been using OpenType fonts (either OpenType CFF or OpenType TTF formats) for new content.

Most of us recognize that there is plenty of “legacy” content formatted using old Type 1 fonts. Re-editing such content to use the newer fonts could be exceptionally time-consuming and expensive. And most of the OpenType versions of the Type 1 fonts have enough metric and encoding differences to cause major hassles in such re-edit operations. My recommendation is to immediately convert any such legacy Type 1 fonts to OpenType CFF fonts using a product such as TransType4 from the Fontlab folks. It is inexpensive and produces OpenType CFF equivalents of Type 1 fonts that makes updating of legacy content fairly trivial. However, do this sooner rather than later since OS support (especially MacOS support) for Type 1 fonts may be on life support, at best.

InDesign Requiring “Authorized” Fonts?

There is absolutely no benefit to either Adobe customers or to Adobe for requiring use of fonts via the Adobe Font Service, requiring uploading of all user-provided fonts to cloud storage, and somehow validating that user's personal fonts are kosher. Although a “free” service to users of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications, it actually costs Adobe royalties to the original font designer / foundry every time you activate / use such fonts. It costs Adobe nothing for you to use fonts you license on your own and host on your own system.

Please, rabblerousing and paranoia really has no such place here, regardless of what you think of Adobe.

- Dov
 
InDesign Requiring “Authorized” Fonts?

There is absolutely no benefit to either Adobe customers or to Adobe for requiring use of fonts via the Adobe Font Service, requiring uploading of all user-provided fonts to cloud storage, and somehow validating that user's personal fonts are kosher. Although a “free” service to users of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications, it actually costs Adobe royalties to the original font designer / foundry every time you activate / use such fonts. It costs Adobe nothing for you to use fonts you license on your own and host on your own system.

Please, rabblerousing and paranoia really has no such place here, regardless of what you think of Adobe.

- Dov
Hi Dov!
You aren't paranoid if they really are out to get you. (see the movie Conspiracy Theory 🙄 lol)
- Addressing the benefit to Adobe seems to me that controlling/renting their fonts is absolutely something they are doing right now. And I have personally seen INDD default to 'online auto loading' vs local fonts that I already have activated. (grumble grumble exact names grumble grumble)
- You are absolutely right that replacing fonts in existing documents is a royal pain. We are not usually in the document creation realm and are at the mercy of the designer ie versions of fonts, etc. We won't demand that our customers change what they are doing today. We DO see them switching to the 'easy to use' online fonts. Then any other application that needs to edit the documents could be left sucking air. (Looking at you 👀Affinity)
- Type foundries are managing their interaction with Adobe as they see fit.

So let's not talk about Type 1's we paid for (if we convert them are they still legally ours???) or the default settings that can be stumbled upon or changed at the whim of Adobe.

And when possible I'll continue using other products with all the inherent random problems.
(y)
 
Hi Dov!
You aren't paranoid if they really are out to get you. (see the movie Conspiracy Theory 🙄 lol)
- Addressing the benefit to Adobe seems to me that controlling/renting their fonts is absolutely something they are doing right now. And I have personally seen INDD default to 'online auto loading' vs local fonts that I already have activated. (grumble grumble exact names grumble grumble)
- You are absolutely right that replacing fonts in existing documents is a royal pain. We are not usually in the document creation realm and are at the mercy of the designer ie versions of fonts, etc. We won't demand that our customers change what they are doing today. We DO see them switching to the 'easy to use' online fonts. Then any other application that needs to edit the documents could be left sucking air. (Looking at you 👀Affinity)
- Type foundries are managing their interaction with Adobe as they see fit.

So let's not talk about Type 1's we paid for (if we convert them are they still legally ours???) or the default settings that can be stumbled upon or changed at the whim of Adobe.

And when possible I'll continue using other products with all the inherent random problems.
(y)

From what I recall, a few years back there was a release of InDesign that had a bug in it that caused the underlying font system within InDesign to use an Adobe Fonts Service version of any font that you had locally installed. That was absolutely not what was supposed to happen and the bug was quickly fixed. I have many fonts installed locally that are also available with the Adobe Fonts Service and I haven't seen any override of my local fonts since that fix.

How do you derive that “controlling/renting their fonts is absolutely something they are doing right now?” A single option from the Creative Cloud Desktop application totally disables access and use of the Adobe Fonts Service:

Snag_2293beff.png

And if you do have not disabled the Adobe Fonts Service, for further protection, you should check your InDesign Preferences and and make sure that the Auto-activate Adobe Fonts option is disabled:

Snag_2284a798.png


A similar option is available in Illustrator. (I haven't found anything comparable in Photoshop at this point!)

Thus, assuming that you are using a reasonably recent version of these applications (i.e., within the last two years or so) and you have turned off the options I've pointed out above, exactly how can you say “that controlling/renting their fonts is absolutely something they are doing right now?”

You do make a valid point that if someone uses InDesign and relies on an Adobe Fonts Service cloud service font, they are exceptionally limited as to their options if they wish to move to another application and totally give up their subscription to any or all of the Creative Cloud applications (i.e., dump Adobe software entirely). However, using fonts in the Adobe Fonts Service has other serious drawbacks:

(1) Fonts periodically get “retired” from the Adobe Fonts Service when the originating foundry decides it can make for money independent of Adobe.

(2) Fonts periodically get updated with versions with either different glyph complements, glyph designs, metrics, etc.

(3) Fonts used for web purposes (i.e., on web pages) must be hosted by Adobe on its “Typekit” servers. I certainly wouldn't want to hobble my website performance by having to rely on the indirection to and the performance of Adobe servers.

Personally, I see the Adobe Fonts Service as at best, a wonderful way to try out fonts, especially those that are either Adobe Originals or sourced from other major / reliable font foundries through the Adobe Fonts Service. If I really like a particular font or font family and wish to use same on a regular and continuing basis, I would then independently license same and discontinue use of same via the service. If I wanted use of such fonts for web pages, I would license them for “self hosting.”

I will also note that a good number of the fonts provided by the Adobe Fonts Service are “free” fonts that you can download from Google and use both for desktop and web use with no licensing costs at all. They work perfectly fine with Adobe applications. (Make no such assumptions about fonts downloaded from random “free fonts” websites on the web – many such fonts are in fact pirated!)

Back to the issue of the Type 1 fonts …

Your legal ability to convert Type 1 fonts to equivalent OpenType CFF fonts as I described in my previous response clearly depends on the EULA (End User License Agreement) associated with the Type 1 fonts that you originally acquired.

In the case of fonts licensed directly from Adobe (and this includes fonts that Adobe originally sourced from Linotype, Monotype, ITC, etc.), the EULA absolutely permits you to convert the font to a different format for your own use, whether that was MacOS Type 1 to Windows Type 1 or to either OpenType CFF, OpenType TTF, or even older TrueType formats (for best consistency, I would recommend conversion to OpenType CFF, the OpenType version of Type 1 fonts with the same outlines and metrics).

For fonts sourced from elsewhere, the vendor's own EULA prevails (even if the vendor sourced the fonts from Adobe!!!) and many such EULAs are quite draconian. Since I am not a lawyer, I cannot and will not offer advice for dealing with those older Type 1 fonts.

- Dov
 
Dov -
Excellent writeup on font auto activation options and gotchas.
And it's good to know that we can convert our existing Adobe purchased type1's to OTF CFF legally as we may have done so for convenience sake already.
Thank you.
 
See my subsequent reply. If the threshold values are properly set, you should see no difference in the embedding. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the changes in support of Type 1 fonts.

- Dov
Dov - excellent reply. I never knew of that preference setting. With that said you asked a question of why we would need the font to be fully embedded.
Answer - we output a pdf with LITHO and LASER on it. We utilize Switch and Enfocus Pitstop to duplicate and isolate the LITHO vs Laser. So, now, I have a PDF that has JUST the laser that will need to get programmed. We use a VERY expensive piece of software called, Quadient Inspire. We bring that PDF (with the laser only) into that program to then apply programming to. IF we bring in a font that is not embedded and say it says "Dear Mr. Sample,"
I now only have access to the capitalized letters of D, M, S. This is why it is done.
 
The second use case is that in which you think that you can or will subsequently “edit” the text of a PDF file and would need all the glyphs of the font to allow such editing. The fact though is that if you wish to edit text in a PDF file in Acrobat (or even, gulp, in Illustrator - a strict “no, no”) you in fact need to install that font on the system on which the editing is being done. These applications do not use the embedded font for editing. Thus, for this purpose, fully embedding the font in the PDF file won't help you one iota.

I'd be very interested in any other valid use cases one would have for fully embedding a font in a PDF file. During my 31 years at Adobe, we never saw any such use case (other than some severely broken third party RIP or PDF workflow tool).

- Dov
#2. Which is exactly our use case as printers.
Customer sends PDF file. Customer wants edits of text.
PitStop DOES USE THE EMBEDDED fonts IF they are fully available.
They have a whole menu system devoted to fonts and their locations.
So yes we prefer fully embedded.

So DOV, does EPS format embed the complete font automatically?
I seem to remember watching rips parse all the fonts in the document before ripping files.
 
#2. Which is exactly our use case as printers.
Customer sends PDF file. Customer wants edits of text.
PitStop DOES USE THE EMBEDDED fonts IF they are fully available.
They have a whole menu system devoted to fonts and their locations.
So yes we prefer fully embedded.

So DOV, does EPS format embed the complete font automatically?
I seem to remember watching rips parse all the fonts in the document before ripping files.

What PitStop is doing is possibly not legal (in terms of the font's original license) and very possibly yields problematic results when doing such edits.

In the first case, unless the font is licensed for “editability,” once the font is embedded in a PDF file (or for that matter in an EPS file), you in fact are not legally entitled to edit text using that embedded fonts, plain and simple. That is exactly why Acrobat doesn't permit editing with embedded fonts and will only allow editing if the font is legally installed on the system on which the editing is being performed.

However, there is one other important consideration. Unless one is embedding a full OpenType font (an option in Distiller, but not otherwise available in other applications), even if the “full font” is being embedded, it is only the glyph definitions and the advance widths that are being embedded. The other OpenType tables for kerning, alternate character mapping, etc. are not embedded. Thus, any editing that is done with such embedded fonts is problematic anyway in terms of quality.

With regards to EPS files, it depends what makes the EPS files. Typically, subsetting is done for EPS files as well.

In terms of the “overhead” at RIP time of having a full font embedded, that is really insignificant. As far as I know, RIPs simply store the font definitions when encountered and don't do any real interpretation until specific glyphs from such fonts are accessed by the text being rendered.

- Dov
 
Dov - excellent reply. I never knew of that preference setting. With that said you asked a question of why we would need the font to be fully embedded.
Answer - we output a pdf with LITHO and LASER on it. We utilize Switch and Enfocus Pitstop to duplicate and isolate the LITHO vs Laser. So, now, I have a PDF that has JUST the laser that will need to get programmed. We use a VERY expensive piece of software called, Quadient Inspire. We bring that PDF (with the laser only) into that program to then apply programming to. IF we bring in a font that is not embedded and say it says "Dear Mr. Sample,"
I now only have access to the capitalized letters of D, M, S. This is why it is done.

That “VERY expensive piece of software” or perhaps Switch or PitStop are apparently the problem and they should be fixed. See my response to @chriscozi in terms of legal and practical issues associated with processing of PDF files using any embedded fonts. ;)

- Dov
 
However, there is one other important consideration. Unless one is embedding a full OpenType font (an option in Distiller, but not otherwise available in other applications), even if the “full font” is being embedded, it is only the glyph definitions and the advance widths that are being embedded. The other OpenType tables for kerning, alternate character mapping, etc. are not embedded. Thus, any editing that is done with such embedded fonts is problematic anyway in terms of quality.

With regards to EPS files, it depends what makes the EPS files. Typically, subsetting is done for EPS files as well.

In terms of the “overhead” at RIP time of having a full font embedded, that is really insignificant. As far as I know, RIPs simply store the font definitions when encountered and don't do any real interpretation until specific glyphs from such fonts are accessed by the text being rendered.

- Dov
Yes. The kerning etc. tables are not embedded.
But if you just need to fix grammar or spelling then it works just fine. Anything more and you start over.

EPS file substance is definitely determined by the creating application.
Many applications have either hobbled or esoteric EPS creation routines. (See ?older? QXP or MSFT as examples)
In the good old days when distilling either worked or didn't. :)
Now we all use PDF and are loving or hating it.
 
Yes. The kerning etc. tables are not embedded.
But if you just need to fix grammar or spelling then it works just fine. Anything more and you start over.

EPS file substance is definitely determined by the creating application.
Many applications have either hobbled or esoteric EPS creation routines. (See ?older? QXP or MSFT as examples)
In the good old days when distilling either worked or didn't. :)
Now we all use PDF and are loving or hating it.
That still doesn't address the legal issues I pointed out in my previous response.

I'll add one more issue, file size. Assuming one has the editable or installable fsType flag set in the font, embedding full fonts can yield ridiculously large PDF files. Font families such as Arial, Calibri, and Times New Roman have glyph complements in excess of 4500 and/or font file sizes up to or exceeding 1 megabyte to accommodate many character sets and languages as well as symbols. And for some Asian (CJK) fonts, the glyph complement and font file sizes can be up to an order of magnitude higher.

- Dov
 
That still doesn't address the legal issues I pointed out in my previous response.

I'll add one more issue, file size.

- Dov
Yes there are legal issues if you do and don't own the font (Sheesh -licensing). I speak marginal Legalese.
We are lucky, as printers, to still 'seem' to have (Sheesh -licensing) a carve out for our 'rips' which either need the fonts in the file or resident.
And, by the way, who controls/licenses the majority of the 'rip' software market? You've already colored me 'paranoid.'
Dov - really, file size? And orders of magnitude? Sure. NP.

I just want repeatable, stable, quality output with a minimum of software tax.
Adobe vs WIW (WhatIWant)
Repeatable = usually
Stable = hmmmmm
Quality = for sure
Tax = hmmmmm

If 'my' hardware or software never stray from the approved Adobe ecosystem of software, and in exchange for the tax, I am supposed to have all of the above.
This is what I tell the owner of the 'Printing Business' - ie my boss and 'we' buy the kool-aid.
And on an irregular basis I have to defend the problems/time/costs associated with individual jobs or files for whatever reason.
So go ahead and label me paranoid.
My job and our trade RELY on that assumption - do you disagree??
Any time 'we' experience issues/costs out of our control we HAVE to examine the basis of that relationship.

Thanks Dov for your industry, programming, and processes insight.
We are all better together.
 

PressWise

A 30-day Fix for Managed Chaos

As any print professional knows, printing can be managed chaos. Software that solves multiple problems and provides measurable and monetizable value has a direct impact on the bottom-line.

“We reduced order entry costs by about 40%.” Significant savings in a shop that turns about 500 jobs a month.


Learn how…….

   
Back
Top