I'm curious why you feel it's a "horrible" thing to do to a font?
I've never had an issue with a font that has been converted to paths, either by me or our customers in the 20+ years we've been digital.
On behalf of Adobe, there are only two good reasons to convert text to paths.
The first reason is to achieve artistic affects with text such as but not limited to joining glyphs or distorting either individual glyphs or text in ways that cannot be done with conventional text transformation capabilities of either PostScript or PDF that are accessible in Illustrator or InDesign.
The second reason is to accommodate devices or braindead workflow systems that feed special devices that only support vector operations, such as specialized sign cutters. (And even for these devices, the RIP
should -famous last words - be capable of deriving the vectors for cutter from the font definitions in the PDF or PostScript file submitted!)
Otherwise, converting text to paths or outlines (aka “outlining text”) has a number of very negative consequences:
(1) Once you convert the text to paths or outlines in your source InDesign or Illustrator file, you lose the ability to further edit such text. You'd better save a version of the document with the “live text” before doing these conversions.
(2) The resultant PDF file has no capability for either text search or text touch-up either in Acrobat or in third party plug-ins or applications. All that remains are tons of vectors.
(3) The resultant PDF file is likely to be grossly inflated in size compared to one which uses fonts to render the text. Furthermore, rendering time for that text for both printing and display may increase dramatically since the entire font and glyph caching mechanism of the RIP is effectively bypassed. Each character is its own independent filled polygon (and sometimes more than one such polygon).
(4) For screen display and for printing, depending upon the font's characteristics and the style used as well as the particular point size in combination with device resolution (and viewing magnification for display), you are very likely to get over-emboldened looking text especially in areas of fine detail. These problems are especially evident at text sizes and with serif fonts and can often be seen with devices up to 1200dpi. Why is this the case? Text rendered using fonts take advantage of a feature of most high quality commercial fonts known as
hinting.
Hinting is data put into the font by the font designer to assist the RIP's renderer when dealing with not enough pixels to fully and properly render the fine detail in a glyph's design, such as serifs and thin stems. Converting text to paths effectively throws away all the hinting information and causes the scaling of the polygons now representing the text to be done entirely linearly, without regard for how the results will look. Rendering text with fonts is
intelligent rendering and scaling. Converting text to paths yields
simple linear scaling!!
Requirements provided by some print service providers to “outline text” are typically
bubbameissas or urban legends based upon some experience that a printer may have had or heard about some
other printer having had in the distant past usually due to a combination of a dodgy RIP and/or a very defective font. Having personally monitored the bugs reported to Adobe over the last twenty-something years against both our PostScript and Adobe PDF Print Engine implementations, I can assure you that font rendering problems, at least with products based on Adobe implementations, are very, very few and far between and are typically due to malformed fonts and even then only under fairly oddball circumstances (such as non uniform rendering resolutions such as 600x1200 and/or with antialiasing enabled).
- Dov
