Illustrator CS3: Losing fonts

[Miss NV]

Heya, I have a client who has given me artwork in CS4, but I use CS3 and am losing the original font as CS3 has no support for the font used.
Would there be such an issue if I was given a PDF?
Any other way to go about this issue without losing any data?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Fonts are not embedded in Illustrator files. You can try opening your file in Acrobat (or rename the file from .ai to .pdf). An Illustrator file is by default a hybrid and saving an Illustrator file with PDF compatibility or a PDF with illustrator editing capability is essentially the same thing except for the suffix.
Illustrator will open the Illustrator version, Acrobat (or InDesign if you place the file) will access the PDF version of the package.

 

[Miss NV]

Thanks so much!
That was really helpful