Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Please post all questions and comments regarding Help & Manual 7 here.

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
User avatar
Ed Hawco
Posts: 165
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2013 5:50 pm
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Unread post by Ed Hawco »

This is probably outside the scope of this H&M forum, but maybe not.

Most of my projects are published as HTML web sites. I use Google Open Sans as the main font. All that works well, no problem.

I also output some of those documents as PDFs, for various reasons.

The problem: some users (not very many, but some) get a font warning when they go to open the PDF:

"Cannot find or create the font 'OpenSans'. Some characters may not display or print correctly."

Fortunately the substituted font seems to be virtually identical (at least on the ones I've seen.) This would not be a huge problem except that one of the people who gets this error is my boss!

Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > Font Embedding has the following settings:
- Font Mode: Embed TrueType Fonts. (None are excluded.)
- Embed font collections as Type 3
- Optimize embedded fonts for cross-platform compatibility.
(These are all default selections AFAIK)

The machine I use has Open Sans installed as a TrueType font.

Styles in the Typography Repository are set up to use Open Sans in both HTML and Printed modes.

When I inspect the PDF in Acrobat Pro it says that Open Sans is embedded:
https://www.blork.org/pix/opensans-embedding.png
(For some reason the IMG BBEdit code is not working, so that's a link to a screenshot of the font embeddings...)

Any ideas why SOME users are getting font complaints and not others?
e
d
============================================
Ed Hawco
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23155
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ed,

What you need to do here is to ask the people getting the error message what PDF viewer they are using (name and version). All other things being equal -- and they are since it's the same PDF file -- the difference must be there. For example, it's possible that the Type 3 embedding is throwing off an older or non-mainstream viewer. And since I assume you are producing PDFs in English you could try switching from Type 3 embedding to normal TTF embedding, which will also give you slightly sharper text. Just select the "Embed fonts" option, with exclusions if you wish.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
User avatar
Ed Hawco
Posts: 165
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2013 5:50 pm
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Re: Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Unread post by Ed Hawco »

A follow-up, for anyone interested...

My sample size is very small; two known users getting the font error (others may have been getting it, but only two reported it). Both are using Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows 10. One is using Reader DC and the other is using Reader X (10.1.7). Interestingly, the person using Reader DC also tried it using something called PDF Architect (a non-Adobe PDF application) and it did not report the problem.

A bit of research shows that Reader DC is throwing a lot of font problems at users. Mostly rendering problems because the default settings are not very useful, but I've also seen a few reports of font embedding problems.

I went into Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > Font Embeddings and unchecked "Embed font collections as Type3." (I don't know why that was checked in the first place; is that the default setting?) Re-sent the PDF to my two test cases. The one using Reader X reports the problem as solved. The other guy is gone home for the day but I suspect he'll report the same thing on Monday.

So as far as I'm concerned, this is resolved. I just have to uncheck that option in all of my projects and that's it.
e
d
============================================
Ed Hawco
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23155
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ed,

Some less capable PDF viewers may have problems with Type 3 font embedding. However, full-featured viewers like Adobe Reader, Foxit and PDFXChange don't, and Type 3 solves myriad problems with special characters and international character sets. However, it also makes slightly less sharp text, so for Latin character sets without symbols and special characters it can be preferable to use just standard TTF embedding.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
User avatar
Martin Wynne
Posts: 2656
Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 3:21 pm
Location: West of the Severn, UK

Re: Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Ed Hawco wrote:I use Google Open Sans ... "Cannot find or create the font 'OpenSans' ... The machine I use has Open Sans installed
Hi Ed,

I've no idea if this is relevant, but there seems to be a discrepancy there between "OpenSans" and "Open Sans".

Martin.
User avatar
Ed Hawco
Posts: 165
Joined: Thu Nov 07, 2013 5:50 pm
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Re: Font embedding (or not) in PDF

Unread post by Ed Hawco »

I saw that too, and I'm not sure if it's relevant. A quick look at other font names in the PDF metadata seems to indicate that the space between words in font names is always dropped, which indicates that is NOT a problem, but I'm not 100% sure.
e
d
============================================
Ed Hawco
Post Reply