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Arial Font issues using Acrobat Pro 9 and Word 2007

Brew_City
Registered: Mar 26 2009
Posts: 6

Since I've upgraded to Office 2007 and Acrobat Professional 9, I've been having issues creating and editing PDF's that contain the Arial Font. My company uses Arial as their Font of choice for many client deliverables.

Editing A PDF:
When we go to edit a PDF (created in Acrobat pro 8 or 9) and use the Text Touchup Tool we get an error message that says "Warning! Since the original font is not available, a substituted font for editing is used. Any changes to the text of the original font will place a new font dependency upon the document." Then if we make the changes and save the PDF the spacing throughout the document is changed.
Creating a PDF:
If we try to create a PDF from a .docx containing Arial it substitutes other fonts and messes up the spacing.

Troubleshooting:
I noticed if I go to the Acrobat Tab in Word > Preferences > Advanced Settings > Fonts > Arial doesn't show up anywhere in Embedding. Yet if I go to the C:\Windows\Fonts folder Arial is definitely there and it works fine in Office products.

Resolution:
I need to be able to edit existing PDF's and create new PDF's using Arial font.

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.1, Windows
Brew_City
Registered: Mar 26 2009
Posts: 6
When I check Acrobat Distiller it does show all the correct font locations, but it doesn't list Arial even though its in the C:\Windows\fonts directory. It does show the following variations of Arial:
Arial-Black
Arial-BoldItalicMT
Arial-BoldMT
Arial-ItalicMT
ArialMT
ArialNarrow
ArialNarrow-Bold
ArialNarrow-BoldItalic
ArialNarrow-Italic

Is there anyone else out there with Acrobat 9 that has Arial font listed in Distiller or Acrobat?
hampelmann
Registered: May 12 2009
Posts: 2
Thanks a lot for your posting: I have exactly the same problem - and you described all the details very well!

My trouble started with an upgrade from Acrobat 7.0.9 to version 9.0.0; until then, the TouchUpText-Tool worked alright. (A further upgrade to version 9.1.0 didn't bring any help in this concern, either.)

This Acrobat update was the only change to my system's software configuration: As before, I have 'Windows XP Professional SP2' as operating system and 'Microsoft Word 2003 SP3' as source file editing software.

Someone gave me the hint that an OS upgrade to 'Windows XP SP3' (instead of SP2) could be helpful, as this Service Pack comes along with a new version of the Arial font. This font then might be identified properly by Acrobat, so he said.
But as I'm not entitled to install this Service Pack on my PC and our IT department doesn't want to do this (due to certain problems supposed to be hidden in SP3), I cannot check it out and thus only forward it as a hint.

Please let me know when you find any solution (I'll do it the other way round as well, of course!)

Thanks again and Best regards,
r
Brew_City
Registered: Mar 26 2009
Posts: 6
Hampelmann,
I actually have users on Both XP Pro SP3 and Windows Vista and it still doesn't work on either OS. I have actually given up using Arial and moved to Calibri (which works great). I don't know if that will work for you, but I wasn't able to get and answer in any of the forums I posted in or from either Adobe or Microsoft's paid support.
hampelmann
Registered: May 12 2009
Posts: 2
Hi again,

having had similar experiences with some software sellers' support departments, I think I now found some kind of solution by myself. However, the very helpful hint from your side was to check the conversion settings in the Adobe Distiller resp Adobe PDF-Maker:
For some reason, in the Distiller's Standard (!) setting, the Arial fonts (among others) are included in a list of fonts which are never to be embedded.

Solution:
- remove at least the 'Arial' fonts from the 'Never Embed' list in the 'pdf-settings'/'fonts'-window,
- make sure the 'Embed all fonts'-box is ticked
- Save this setting under a different name.

Now, the warning about the font replacing will still pop up. However, the spacing seems no longer to be messed up by the TouchUpText-tool. (I've checked this with a 40-pages file; I hope it will still be true for longer documents...)
jmgarroway
Registered: Aug 3 2009
Posts: 1
These posts were a big help, but I had to go a little further to get a successful result, so I thought I'd share. These instructions assume you're using Word 2007.

On the Word menu bar, go to Acrobat--Preferences--Settings
Choose “Advanced Settings”
Choose “Fonts”
Click “Add Name”
Type in “Arial” (no quotation marks) and select “Always Embed” then click “Add”
Click OK

I wasn’t able to add font names that required a space (e.g., Arial Black), and entering actual font file names (arial.ttf) didn’t work either. However, by just adding Arial, the regular Arial font successfully converted over; it also worked when I applied either a bold or an italic setting to the regular Arial font (in other words, the font name still read “Arial” not “Arial Bold”). Hope this helps!
JanKan01
Registered: Aug 11 2010
Posts: 1
Word 2007, Acrobat Pro 9

After removing the 'never embed arial fonts', I added the arial font (no quotes, no proper name, I also tried proper name and quotes in other attempts) and rebooted, no changes.

I made sure Distiller was pointing to the correct font directory, even added a second directory where arial bold also resides. I'll remove this second directory to see if that makes a difference but beyond that, I'm stumped. Any thoughts? thanks...j