OpenType font prohibited in PDF/X-1a

[nickyg]

Hi Forum,

I've recently been coming across this statement "OpenType font prohibited in PDF/X-1a" and in particular if you look at Acrobat 8 Pro custom checks in preflight, it says

"Text uses OpenType font. Support for OpenType fonts has been introduced in PDF 1.6 (Acrobat 7). OpenType fonts are prohibited in PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3 and PDF/A-1 files"

What the hell is this all about ?

I've been using Open Type fonts with success in PDF/X-1a files for a while now...

Can anyone please shed some light on this statement.

Thank you,

Nick.

 

[leonardr]

Re: OpenType font prohibited in PDF/X-1a

It's some unfortunate wording describing a low level technical
detail...Let me explain.

Support for NATIVE OpenType fonts wasn't introdued until PDF 1.6 (as
Preflight says), and therefore isn't supported in PDF/X-1a (or PDF/X-3).
By "native", I mean that the complete OpenType font data is embedded
into the PDF.

However, since OpenType is really a "merging" of parts of TrueType and
Type 1 it is quite easily for a PDF production tool (aka Distiller,
Adobe PDFLibrary, etc.) to "extract out" from an OpenType (.otf) font
the old style TrueType or Type 1 font data and embed that into a PDF.
In fact, that's what Adobe's PDF tools (and most 3rd party tools) have
been doing with OTF fonts for almost 10 years now.

So there is no problem using your OpenType fonts and creating PDF/X-1a
documents - people do it everyday, and will continue to do so for many
years to come.

Leonard

 

[nickyg]

Re: OpenType font prohibited in PDF/X-1a

thank you, thank you, thank you !

That clears that then !

Cheers,

Nick.