Remember that “font” is a four letter word beginning with an
F.
One of the biggest mistakes made by the original Adobe Acrobat team was to allow for font usage by reference only, i.e. not embedding all fonts used in a PDF file's text. Part of that decision was the assumption that at least the
Base 14 fonts would always be available for use in rendering on the screen and on printers (either as operating system fonts or printer resident fonts). In fact, in early versions of Acrobat (and Acrobat Reader), those
Base 14 fonts were bundled with Acrobat and Reader! (These were four faces of Helvetica, four faces of Times, four faces of Courier, Symbol, and ITC Zapf Dingbats.) Those fonts were always available as printer-resident fonts in Postscript Level 2 and PostScript Language Level 3 devices.
Later on, Adobe stopped bundling Helvetica and Times with Acrobat and Reader due to significant licensing cost increases from Monotype (which had acquired the Linotype type libraries). The assumption was that for non-critical work, the Monotype Arial and Times New Roman fonts bundled with Windows and MacOS were “good enough” to mimic Linotype Helvetica and Times – the “advance widths” were the same. That having been said, the actual glyph designs were certainly not identical, especially with Helvetica versus Arial. And if you had a more current version of Helvetica or Times installed on your host system, there was no guarantee that the glyph complements and/or matching of particular characters in the host font matched that of the resident fonts on the printer.
There was also the hack in Acrobat and Reader that attempted to substitute missing fonts with synthesized Type 1 Multiple Master font instances from the Adobe Sans MM and Adobe Serif MM fonts bundled with Acrobat and Reader.
There were those of us within Adobe who vehemently opposed the idea of allowing PDF without embedded fonts. It didn't take much foresight to know the problems that this would cause, especially when viewing PDF files without all fonts embedded or for printing. Hate to say it, but we were right!!!
Interestingly, within the last 10 years of so (PDF and Acrobat are over 30 years old now), we were able to convince the Adobe teams to modify the “standard joboptions” to always embed all fonts (as “subsets” – only the glyphs actually referenced within the PDF file's text unless it was a PDF form in which full font embedding is employed).
Even the first version of PDF/X, (PDF/X-1a) required at least subset embedding of all fonts referenced in the PDF files' text. This requirement has been maintained in
all PDF/X versions up to and included PDF/X-6 (which regrettably, although the RIP/DFE developers support,
none of the graphic arts content creation software support).
Important note – it is total BS that it is safer to embed the full font in a PDF file as opposed to the subset of glyphs actually referenced by text in the PDF file. All you accomplish is bulking up the size of the PDF file and possibly slowing processing speed. Other than some CloneScript RIPs from 20 years ago or so, we have never seen printing problems with use of subsetted fonts! (Also note, embedding a full font
does not, repeat
does not, facilitate editing text of a PDF file in Acrobat – for such editing, the actual font itself must be installed on the user's system, Acrobat
does not use any embedded fonts for text editing!)
Recommendations:
For files generated by modern graphic arts application versions (i.e., versions from the last 15 years or more), use the PDF/X-4 export/generation settings. Do not flatten transparency or convert all colors to CMYK unless you like degrading output quality. For preflighting such files, I recommend two steps. Use the
Verify compliance with PDF/X-4 Acrobat Preflight profile. If that fails, depending upon the error detected, you could use the appropriate
Convert to PDF/X-4 profile. You don't need any extra-cost software to accomplish this. The second step is to simply page through the PDF file on-screen and see if anything doesn't look quite kosher! (An optional third step I recommend to to print one copy of the PDF file from Acrobat - not MacOS File Viewer or similar non-fully PDF-compliant applications to a PostScript 3 printer.)
For files generated by other applications including Microsoft Office applications which don't directly support PDF/X (or any flavor), if you use Microsoft's native PDF creation (as opposed to the
Save as Adobe PDF option provided if you have Acrobat installed), use whatever options are available to allow for font embedding. A number of available validation tests are available in Acrobat Preflight. I would strongly recommend the using the
Font not embedded validation profile in the
Essentials group of Acrobat Preflight. If that preflight profile finds one or more unembedded fonts
and if any such fonts are actually installed on your system you can use the
Embed missing fonts profile in the
Acrobat Pro DC 2015 preflight profile group. As for the PDF/X-4 files, paging through the PDF file and printing one copy on a PostScript 3 printer are highly advised.
These steps could/should resolve most font issues although many more problems can arise. As previously indicated, if you start off with a PDF/X-4 file, at least from graphic arts applications (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark, Corel, etc.) many if not most printing issues can be avoided (other than those of the graphic designer making bad color and other design choices during document creation and layout)!
- Dov
