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Gannon29814328ktot
Participant
March 25, 2025
Question

Acrobat and Distiller Can't Remove Font Locations

  • March 25, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 438 views

I've had the problem of Adobe PDF Printer / Distiller Slowing down when "checking fonts" after a while it will create the pdf, but because of our workflow this amount of time is very annoying and slows down the day, we work to a scrict deadline so you can imagine having a program became suspended is not the best.

Recently however, I think I have worked out the problem, when creating the pdf it seems that Distiller checks 4 directorys for fonts to embed into the document, 2 of these directorys are mapped to the same network drive where we keep our company wide collection of fonts, this collection is old and massive including about 10,000 font files, I think whats happening is distiller is checking these directorys for fonts and becuase its massive and it may be checking it twice it slows down and takes ages.

The next problem is I cant seem to tell Distiller not to check those folders, I have removed them from the Distiller program but according to the job options the pdfs are made with those directorys are still being checked and i have no idea how to fix that, any help is welcome, unless you tell me to change the workflow, due to reasons im not gonna get into we have to use the old and terrible "Print to PDF"

1 reply

creative explorer
Community Expert
creative explorerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 26, 2025

@Gannon29814328ktot That's exactly what I would have done too! I used to work in Pre-Press, and back in thos days, we had to buy Adobe's Font Folio () think that's what it was called, which had 10,000+ fonts) for our client files, just in case they nver packaged it for us. In theory, I would probably would remove some of those fonts! 

This is going to sound extreme... but have you thought of disconnecting from the server? I would package the fonts to your local computer, disconnect from the wi-fi or ethernet cable, physically unplugging the cable will disconnect it from the network—and then distill the PDF. Extreme measures = Extreme results! 

 

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Gannon29814328ktotAuthor
Participant
March 26, 2025

That font folder is shared between all designers and the rule is, if you are using a new font you must add the files to the shared location so that if another designer jumped into the InDesign doc they could find and install the needed fonts, because of this its been slowly growing for years by each designer that has come and gone before me.

My First thought was to disconnect from the drive as well, but the problem with that is we work off that network drive for collaboration reasons so the files that are being made into pdfs are stored on the drive, but I did think as a temporary measure to disconnect and print a test page and see if it comes to a halt, as that would narrow down the issue, I think what we may try is to rename the folder to break that link and then see if it still grinds to a halt.

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