Often I get PDF/X-1a files which (naturally) have embedded fonts. ...
I guess a workaround would be to convert the text to outlines but that's not always an option.
A few important notes on behalf of Adobe:
(1) Adobe Illustrator is
not a general purpose PDF file editor. The only PDF files that Illustrator can accurately and fully edit are Illustrator files saved as PDF with which the
Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities option is specified and for which fonts used in the original Illustrator document are installed. When you open a PDF file that from Illustrator that was
not created with
Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities or a PDF file created via other means, Illustrator
converts that PDF to an internal format, a process that may in fact be lossy, especially when multiple color spaces are used in the PDF file or graphic capabilities are exercised that are not part of the Illustrator feature set. Illustrator's graphic model is a subset of the full PDF imaging model! Be very careful in opening such PDF files in Illustrator; you do so at your own risk!!
(2) Note that contrary to some unfortunate perceptions provided by some Adobe marketing folks a number of years back (closer to 10 years ago now), PDF is
not, repeat
not the native file format of Adobe Illustrator. When you save a .AI file, a private file format is saved as private data within a dummy PDF file. When you save an Illustrator file as a PDF file with the
Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities option specified, the content is output
twice within the PDF file, first as PDF compatible content and secondly as a private file format within a private data section of that PDF file. When you open such a PDF file in Illustrator, it uses the private data,
not the PDF data!!!
(3) The fonts embedded within either a PDF file saved by Illustrator (with or without the
Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities option) or by any other PDF generator are
never used by either Illustrator for editing or by Acrobat Pro for touch-up. Why? There are two reasons. One of the reasons touched upon in this thread is the legal reason. We cannot always determine the original embedding access privileges of the font. Requiring the user to install the font on their system puts the onus on the end user to prove license compliance for use of the font in an editing context. But there is another important reason not discussed. Typically not only are fonts subset embedded (in which case only a subset of the fonts' glyphs are accessible), but even if a font is
fully embedded, quite a bit of the font metrics information that is required for full and proper text editing is
not actually embedded in the PDF file. This information includes kerning information, OpenType style tables, ligature information, etc. The only situation in which a truly full font (including all metric information) is embedded in a PDF file is if (a) OpenType fonts are used, (b) PDF 1.6 (Acrobat 7) compatibility is used, (c) the
Embed OpenType fonts option is selected and the
Subset embedded fonts option is
not selected for PDF generators that know what to do with such options. Condition (c) is not available with any Adobe application except Distiller - it is not available for InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop. And for better or worse, neither Acrobat Pro nor Illustrator currently support use of fully embedded OpenType fonts, primarily since the applications don't yet produce them.
- Dov
