Font display problem with Acrobat 8

What type of fonts are these? You can find the details under the File --> Properties --> Font tab.

Well, the fonts used are InterleafSymbols an Swiss721.
In the meantime, I managed to set up a workflow with the trial version of Pitstop Server, in order to replace both fonts with others (I re-encoded my own Swiss721 Postscript into a Truetype version). Decrypting those PDFs first still has to be done manually.
I did a survey about the origin of the PDFs, and found out that they were originally produced by a DPT application called 'Interleaf'. The application apparently petered out during the nineties, and was picked up again by another manufacturor, who redistributed it as 'Quicksilver', which is in its turn is no more available. All PDFs have been produced in 2003 or earlier. Whatever, I have been told that the encoding of both fonts could be too 'old' for whatever reason (any beedback about font encoding would be handy), and that should be the cause of displaying badly in Acrobat 8 (to be more specific: anywhere manual charactar or word spacing has been applied, while owners of previous versions have no problem with it. Wonder what the results will be in version 9...

The issue your having is associated with how the fonts were originally encoded within the PDF. There were some modifications made in Acrobat 8 in how it handles fonts that did not contain all the necessary font specifications.
Here is some background on how [url=http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=333250&sliceId=2]Acrobat 8 handles fonts[/url].

In the technical note titled [url=http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402673&sliceId=1]Issues addressed in the Adobe Reader/Acrobat 8.1.1 update[/url] you'll also find information on how this changed between Acrobat 7 and 8.

Our company is receiving and redistributing PDF files for a car brand. These PDFs originate from different sources, and have therefore been produced by a variety of applications.
In Acrobat v8 and v9, some of these PDFs are displaying and printing fonts erratically: all blank spaces show up as rectangles. All fonts are embedded (subset) though, and the PDFs display fine in earlier versions of Acrobat.
Replacing the fonts with other ones does not really work, since we then stumble upon character encoding problems: characters with accents etc. will be not be replaced properly.
The only tech information I can provide is that the problem PDFs were produced with the application called 'iText'. This seems to be an opensource application besad on Java.
I'm happy to send a sample PDF file to anyone who might be interested.

Rudi Geerts
Easy Company Creatives
rudi [dot] geerts [at] easycompany-creatives [dot] be

What type of fonts are these (File > Properties > Font tab)? Are they Type 3? It may be that they're missing the correct operators.If you have the font on your system, you can use the Preflight tool in Acrobat 9 Pro. to embed the font. The Preflight fixup is called "Embed fonts".

Thanks for your answer. We do have lots of experience with Acrobat and Pitstop.
The fonts are truetype: Dutch 801 SWA ans Swiss 721 SWA, embedded subsets.
We process and redistribute ten thousands of PDF files sent to us from all over the world, many of which are several years old.
In this specific case, we cannot fully embed both of them; neither using our truetype version, nor by the type 1's we found.
The problem also lies within acrobat. The PDFs displayed correctly in versions 7 and prior, but from version 8 on, we see all blank spaces as rectangles. They cannot be selected by Pitstop, and therefore not be replaced. Pitstop does warn that characters are missing, which is strange. To make things worse, Pitstop doesn't even see the font Dutch 801 SWA among the system fonts. Tried out all sorts of actions, both on Mac and Windows, but no result.
An intermediate solution that seemed to work at first was to simply replace both fonts by the likes of Arial and Times New Roman, but later on it came to our attention that special characters like in French or Spanish PDFs were not translated correctly. So it's back to square one. A PDF file is not meant to get such a makeover anyway.
If you wish, I can always send you a sample file...

Actually, I've seen this issue before with files that were originally created in Interleaf as detailed in the following post:
http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=15352

These were custom fonts that shipped with the Interleaf product. Why don't you send me a sample file and I'll see what the encoding looks like. You can use the email link below my avatar to send a file.

After viewing your PDF, it appears that the space glyph was not properly encoded in your file. Regardless of the font that is used, the space glyph is incorrect, instead a notdef (box) is used. It probably didn't appear when viewing the file in earlier versions of Acrobat (7 and earlier) because the viewer was not as strict on incorrect encoding issues.
To correct this, you can unembed the font using the Touchup tool, and then re-embed it using the Preflight Profile tool to embed fonts (new in Acrobat 9 Pro and Extended).

Many thanks for the work you did behind the scenes. We ran a test on PDFs we set aside earlier, and it became clear to us that the problem files were created with iText. We will do a test run shortly, running a few 100 PDFs through Pitstop Server, just to check out if ALL PDFs created by this application need attention or not. If not, we'll try and narrow down the selection based on a notdef (box) check. Since we have to redistribute thousands of PDFs, as explained earlier, we do not wish to reprocess files that were OK anyway.
By the way, unembedding and then re-embedding works just fine.
We're almost there!

I am having the same issue. Font shows up as rectanglar box. Only some of the fonts. Not the whole document. All fonts on this document are CG Omega. Some where embedded and some were not.

This happens when one of the documents is combined with others. I am using acrobat 9. Can you help?

I have a problem with superscripts in a postscript file. I have had no problems with the superscripts showing up in Acrobat 6 but when I create my pdf file from Acrobat 8 professional they do not show up in the output. The fonts that show up in the file are Times-Roman, Bookmastergothic-Roman and Times-Bold. I know the superscripts are there since when I send the file to a colleague and she creates the pdf with acrobat 6 it works for her on her laptop. I have just installed Acrobat 6 and it co-exists with Acrobat 8 Pro however the newely installed ver 6 does not work now either. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks, Bill