Illustrator outlining fonts when opening a pdf

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
March 19, 2021
2 replies
3505 views

When I open a pdf file in Illustrator, sometimes a font is outline only in certain places.

I get a message "To preserve appearance, some text has been outlined." & the same font is outlined in some spots but left as text in others. Some times just one word would outline but the rest of the line would still be a font. Any body know why this happens & how to solve it?

Thanks

Type

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Correct answer Monika Gause

I checked and there is only one version for each font.

This really isn't an issue, I'm just wondering why this would happen & if it's an Illustrator problem or something wrong with my system. That's why I'm interested if others are having the same issue.

Thank You.

This is happening when there are ligatures as Larry already wrote.

You can easily test it with a copy of the paragraph that doesn't have ligatures.

If you think that this is buggy behaviour, then please post a bug report: http://illustrator.uservoice.com

T

TECHNI

Participant

This same thing has happened to me since the last update in December. It has to be a bug because, before the most recent updates, I have never come across my PDFs becoming outlines for the same reason you pointed out.

A

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @TECHNI,

We understand that encountering technical issues can be frustrating. Would you mind sharing more details, like the exact version of the OS/Illustrator, link to a sample file after uploading to Dropbox/Google Drive/etc., and screenshots/screen recording of the problem (https://adobe.ly/49XsEd1), so we can investigate this further?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Anubhav

Larry G. Schneider

Community Expert

The reason is that fonts are being subsetted to less than the complete font. The ligatures of the font are being outlined, especially ones like "ie". One way is to not allow subsetting of fonts when saving the file. It may increase the file size some but should solve the outlining problem.

D

danvhAuthor

Participant

Thank you for your reply.
I did think of this but it doesn't make any sense. Whether the font is subset or not, the characters used are embedded in the document so there should be no reason for the outlining. Also some of the same characters that are outlined in one area are left as a font in another. I've seen it happen to a whole line of type or to just one word. It seems to just randomly outline fonts. Unless this some kind of bug in Illustrator or it's something unique to my system. I'm wondering if anybody else has seen this issue.

Larry G. Schneider

Community Expert

Have you tried to check using Acrobat to see how many versions of subsetted fonts are in in the PDF?

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