Bad font object or font descriptor object

Hi Amy,
The Acrobat SDK's LiveDocs provides some discussion.
"Bad font object or font descriptor object" is associated with an error occurring while trying to embed a font.

Just a thought, but ~
Your end-user's box may not have a font or some of the fonts, used in the PDF, available on their "box".
It may be worth a look-see at the authoring file's font usage versus what font's are provided in the standard image provided to the end-user's box.

Be well...

I thought it might be something like that. However, that leads me to a font embedding question (or 2). I thought that when a font was embedded in a pdf that meant it was not necessary for the receiving computer to have that font in it, so that should mean that the fonts that came from InDesign (Helvetica and Verdana) are not the issue. Is that incorrect?

On the other side of the equation it is possible that the Arial font I specified for all text boxes within Acrobat is not the Arial that PCs use. Do you know if it needs to be? I have several Verdanas and several Arials that I thought I had organized properly. Perhaps not. If I have the Microsoft manufactured Arial that came with MS Word for a Mac, is that the same Arial that would appear on a PC?

Amy,
My understanding of the use of embedded fonts in the PDF is the same as yours.
I'm thinking that the unspoken "major premise" here is the PDF is "direct" from you, the content author, to me, the end-user.
I view the PDF on the web site via the browser or download and view. In network space I'm viewing the PDF in the on my box in the virtual space of RAM. The stored font information is used.

But, for your output, there's additional variable of what has been done to deploy the form on the intranet.
The error presents itself at download, prior to printing. What font(s) are being applied to the form prior to download?
Are they supplied from the end-user's box or the server? In either case I suspect they are not embedded.
How does this come into play with the server OS, the download process used and what, if any, use of something cooked up with the SDK to support the activity.

Just a guess, but the rough edge that's snagging the fabricate of the form may be there.

Be well...

Here's another little twist. Earlier today, because I couldn't think of anything better, I did two different things at once, so I'm not sure which one solved the problem. I went to my fonts and very carefully shut down all the Open Type Arial I was using, and opened the Microsoft Arial family. I have Extensis Suitcase, so I can manage fonts pretty directly. I also went clear back to an April 09 version of the form which was actually made in Acrobat 8 right before I upgraded my software and copied and pasted those form fields into my base PDF from InDesign, and suddenly there was no more problem. Too bad I'm not as systematic as I should be, but one or both of those seems to have, for the time being, fixed it. Not sure what it really means.

For future reference, you might also trying using the Pre-flight tools (Advanced > Preflight) to analyze your fonts. Under the Options menu you'll find a command to "Browse Internal Structure of all Document Fonts". This will give you detailed information on all the fonts in your document and possibly highlight which one or ones are giving you the problem.

Aha! I know how to preflight in InDesign, but it did not occur to me to do it in Acrobat. Thanks to all for the help! --
Amy

Hi, I am getting the error "pdfInspektor: Bad font object or font descriptor object." and want to know how to resolve this error. Thanks.