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Participant
February 25, 2016
Question

Acrobat pdf printer has trouble with Politico website

  • February 25, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1149 views

In both IE11 and Firefox, I cannot print to pdf (Acrobat) anything on Politico's web page. I can print from other sites pdf, but not Politico. On another Win7 machine, printing to Adobe pdf works fine. On Politico, if I use CutePDF, I get the pdf. If I use just "Adobe pdf" I get a log in my plain text editor which reads:

%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%

%%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: definefont; ErrorInfo: StemSnapV --nostringval-- ]%%

Stack:

/Font

-dict-

/ADCFAA+ufXObvDWU0-kGy3SPV

eiwy0w==

%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

I get the above log entry when the Adobe Properties "Rely on system fonts only: do not use document fonts" is unchecked. When it is checked, I get a pdf with garbled text in both Firefox and IE11.

Again, it is NOT Politico. As I said, on another Win7 machine with the same edition of Acrobat, it prints to pdf fine. In that setup, "Rely on system fonts only: do not use document fonts" is checked. So checked gives me garbled text, unchecked gives me a log entry and opens a plain text editor.

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1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Legend
February 25, 2016

I can duplicate what you are seeing with Internet Explorer 11 and Acrobat DC Pro running on Windows 7.

The full error message gives the real story:

%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
%%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: definefont; ErrorInfo: StemSnapH --nostringval-- ]%%

Stack:
/Font
-dict-
/ADCFAA+ProximaNova-Regular


%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

This is indicative of a serious error in the font ProximaNova-Regular which this web site is “serving” to Internet Explorer. It is not using a font installed on your system for this. Acrobat Distiller (a program used by the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance) analyzes fonts in the generated PostScript stream and will not generate PDF files if the font is defective. This prevents possible crashes and/or rendering errors within Acrobat / Reader if that font was embedded and referenced. It would appear that the font being served by the Politico website is either defective or corrupted.

I'll try to see if I can find a copy of this font, install it on my system, use the system fonts only option, and see whether the same problem occurs. BTW, the fact that you are getting gibberish when using the system fonts only option would be indicative of some very strange character encoding on the website for use of this font.

             - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
normanmlAuthor
Participant
February 25, 2016

Thank you, Dov. Eager to see what you discover. Glad you were able to duplicate problem.