Embedding fonts in PDF

[ecarbone]

Sometimes a customer gives us a PDF file and fonts are not embedded.
So, they send over the fonts, we load them on our Mac, then open the PDF file in Acrobat, select File | Print and print to PDF.

This process seems to be a good way to quickly recreate the PDF file, this time with fonts embedded.

Is there any easier way to do this?
Acrobat 9? Pitstop?

Thanks.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

I know using pitstop fonts can be embeded, however have had some problems embedding fonts when cross platform. A PDF magazene can have adverts placed as PDF's this means you an within the same document have Mac and PC encoded versions/subsetts of the same font. So you may want to do a hard copy proof after.

 

[pkleinheider]

Good morning ecarbone,

please also have a look at pdfToolbox 4 from callas software (www.callassoftware com).

We did quite some research until we cam out with a font embedding feature. It took us some time. This had to do with the fact that we wanted to make sure a user does not run into problems when using special encodings, east european and asian fonts.

Regards,

Peter Kleinheider
callas software

 

[the_brain]

ecarbone,

There are a lot of factors related to fonts.
- Font type
- Font encoding
- Font metrics
- single byte vs double byte
- ...

All these factors come in place when remapping or re-embedding fonts.

I think the best way to go is preflighting the documents and filtering out any issues and according to the result do the necessary actions.

According to Peter's answer Callas has extensive options, I can only speak for the Enfocus products.

In PitStop Professional you can set-up a PDF Profile that will check for not correctly embedded fonts and allows you to automatically correct these fonts as well.
But adding Action Lists to this PDF Profile allows you to perform additional checks regarding to font resources, metrics, glyphs, etc. so you can go pretty far.

If you're looking for a more automated solution PitStop Server can help you out using the same settings as mentioned above.

Cheers,
Brain

 

[leonardr]

Sometimes a customer gives us a PDF file and fonts are not embedded.
So, they send over the fonts, we load them on our Mac, then open the PDF file in Acrobat, select File | Print and print to PDF.

This process seems to be a good way to quickly recreate the PDF file, this time with fonts embedded.

This process is a good way to ruin PDF content .

Is there any easier way to do this?
Acrobat 9? Pitstop?

Yes, Acrobat 9 supports embedding of fonts after the fact.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Note that Acrobat has a great compare documents to run after for a consolidated or side by side report.
I have run into instances where the best result was to unembedd fonts and load the fonts in the rip. This was however an exception to fix a problem not a reccomended praxis.

 

[kjacobson]

Fonts and Embedding PDFs

Fonts and Embedding PDFs

We use PitStop both MAC and PC. This seems to work very well!