Font not rendering as expected

Question

I’m resurrecting an old book for reprint from files created in 2000. It included a few Type 1 fonts, which I’ve had to upgrade (creating minor text reflow issues, but generally not bad). But one font, DIN 30640 Std Neutzeit Grotesk Bold Cond.otf seems fine on screen, but renders in a PDF/X-1a:2001 rather fat. Not obviously “faux bold” but just thicker than it should be, and thicker than its screen appearance. Say 15%.

The former font this new DIN is replacing is “DIN Condensed Bold.ttf” (©1981, 2002). When I found out about the font issue, I acquired the new DIN font, and chose to disable the old one via Font Book. I see that the macOS placed it in this directory: [drive]>System>Library>Fonts>Supplemental.

The new font was installed by Font Book into: [drive]>User>[username]>Library>Fonts.
(I’ve never quite understood font & system file locations under OSX, though I get the idea of unix-based user-specific directories.)

The old font is not available in Font Book (grayed out, “Off”). I want to trust Font Book, but I wonder if there is any way that the old font is interfering in the creation of my .pdf where it looks odd, or is somehow only influencing my own OS screen renders when I look at it on my MacBook Pro, but it will be fine in the (offsite) pro printer’s workflow. Was there a problem in the order in which I installed the new one and disabled the old (don’t recall, but may have disabled the old AFTER installing the new)?

I believe the “thinner” look to be the more accurate because I have a hard copy of the book, as printed in 2001, to compare to, and my memory for font looks is pretty reliable. Which is why I cocked my head when I saw the thick render in my output .pdf (from InDesign 20.5.4, as I am running a 2015 MBP under Monterey).

FYI, this is not the same machine or system under which the original document/book was created, of course. That was in 2000 & 2001. And it was done in QuarkXPress 3.31. I used InDesign to bring that old file forward, and still had a lot of work to do to clean it up.

Thoughts?

Bobby Henderson · Answer

Is the "DIN 30640 Std Neutzeit Grotesk" font embedding into the PDF file or is the text being converted to outlines? It should be easy to determine viewing the PDF in Adobe Acrobat. You'll see a text cursor when hovering over live text objects while outlined text objects won't be select-able. Text objects that are outlined can look a bit strange in PDF files; some file-size-saving tricks can be done to objects. For instance, a rectangle shape may be converted to a stroked line.

Technical issues could be related to the quality of the font file itself. I'm familiar with lots of DIN-style fonts, but not the version you're using. If the font file is from a free fonts web site odds are higher it would have technical problems.

Adobe Fonts has a number of DIN-style type families that work pretty well as far as I can tell. There's DIN 2014 and DIN Condensed from Paratype, URW's version of DIN and FF DIN Paneuropean. Those all work pretty well. One of them may cover the DIN style used in your original document better than the font you're currently using.

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