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Strange font shapes and unreadable characters in the PDF file

Forum Index > PDF Creation > Strange font shapes and unreadable characters in the PDF file
2008-08-14 04:52:29
kendavies
Registered: Aug 14 2008
Posts: 4

Hello,

A colleague of mine printed out a PDF file that I generated. Some of the fonts in the printed PDF file appear out-of-shape (slightly squiggly but still readable). These fonts are in plain body text and some of the heading styles. In addition, unreadable characters appear for fonts in the PDF where a keyboard input character format was specified in the source (in Framemaker a different character format can be specified for individual words within a paragraph format).

He printed this PDF file a total of eight times. For the first five times there were no issues, but in the last three times the problems occured.

He printed the files from the same printer and some of the printing was with the PCL profile, while others were with the PS profile.

My colleague viewed the files using Adobe Reader 8 running on Windows XP.

My PC is also Windows XP. The document source is FrameMaker 7.2. When generating the file, I used Acrobat Distiller 8.0. It is compatible with Acrobat 5.0 (PDF 1.0). The Acrobat Reader I have on my PC is Acrobat 8.0.

Thanks,

Ken

My Product Information:
Reader, Windows
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2008-08-16 19:14:29
#1
daka630
Expert
Registered: Mar 1 2007
Posts: 1420
Good day Ken,
Curious about the set up used.
In the Distiller job option, what specifics were used for Fonts?
For the paragraph tag(s) in the text flow(s) affected, what font?
For the character tag(s), what font?
Did the character tag(s) pull from Symbol?
Or Symbol Std?
Are any of the characters using reserved Hex/ANSI values?
Are you printing to a local or network printer from FrameMaker prior to creating the subject output PDF?

Be well...

Be well...

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2008-08-19 05:42:38
#2
kendavies
Registered: Aug 14 2008
Posts: 4
Hello there,

Thanks for responding.

In Acrobat Distiller, I've selected "Embed All Fonts" and "Subset embedded fonts when percent of characters used is less than 100".

The fonts that appear in strange shape in the text flow is "Arial" size 10. and "Courier New" size 10.
The Arial fonts are used in Bulleted, Body, Step, Step +, Note, FigureTitleLOF, and FigureTitleLOT paragraph tags. I think that is most of the paragraph tags that use the font.

The strange characters appear in the keyboard input character tag which is "Courier".

The character tags do not pull from Symbol or Symbol Std.
None of the characters use reserved Hex/Ansi values.

When creating the output PDF, I print to a local postcript driver.

Let me know if this is any other information you require.

Thanks again,

Ken
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