Hello,
I am confused about whether and/or when it is necessary to embed fonts in a document converted to PDF from Word 2003, 2007 or 2010, or from LaTeX.
I am in charge of a repository of theses and dissertations. Students must submit PDFs. The platform we use for our IR has a built-in "font checker." Documents do not pass if they contain un-embedded Type 3 fonts. The font checker also explains that "These fonts are available to all PDF viewers (and do not need to be embedded):
Arial (Bold, Oblique, BoldOblique)
Courier (Bold, Oblique, BoldOblique)
Helvetica (Bold, Oblique, BoldOblique)
Times (Roman, Bold, Italic, BoldItalic)
Symbol
ZapfDingbats"
Are these the only common system fonts? Do any other fonts require embedding? After reading up on font embedding and PDFs I am really confused. Some articles only subsetting is required for all characters in a document to be displayed and printed as intended. Other articles say that font embedding is now completely unnecessary. What do my students need to do to ensure that all the characters in their document are legible?
The necessity of font embedding
2011-02-14 11:45:58
Answered
2011-02-15 08:23:52
#2
How do I subset a font as opposed to embedding a font?
2011-02-15 08:42:20
#3
All fonts are subset by default when creating a PDF in Acrobat / Distiller (and it will say so on the document properties panel). You can specify the entire font is to be embedded in the Distiller presets, and you can convert a subset font to a full font using the fixup tools in Acrobat's Preflight panel; however a font will only be fully-embedded when the license tags in the font header permit it. Windows OS TrueType fonts can be fully-embedded, but about half the commonly-used Adobe fonts can only be subsetted.
2011-02-15 08:54:09
#4
Thank you for your continued help.
Times (v3) (in regular, italic, bold, and bold italic)
Courier (in regular, oblique, bold and bold oblique)
Helvetica (v3) (in regular, oblique, bold and bold oblique)
Symbol
Zapf Dingbats
Although you don't need to embed these fonts in theory, in practice you need to embed *every* character used in a PDF (i.e. the subset of the font), in case it's printed on a system which doesn't support base-14 (such as a hardware rip). PDF/X and PDF/A standards require it too. If a font is embedded it will be used in priority over any OS font.
You only need to embed a complete font if there are editable form fields that use it. Static text and page elements only ever need subset embedding of the glyphs actually used, and for some fonts you cannot embed the entire character set due to licensing restrictions (Acrobat will refuse if you try).
If Adobe Reader can't find an embedded font or an installed font with the same PostScript name, it will use a substitute (Times, Helvetica) - but the results can be difficult to read in some cases, as the character spacing can look strange when the original glyphs were a different width.