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Participant
May 15, 2019
Question

"Cannot extract the embedded font...."

  • May 15, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 2085 views

I created a form in Acrobat using Arial font from the font drop down list.

Every time I open the form I get the following message:

"Cannot extract the embedded font "Arial". Some characters may not display or print correctly."

Searched for this string in the forum with no result.

How can I solve this and remove this message?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Participant
May 15, 2019

Here is the Cloud link to the form.

Adobe Document Cloud

Inspiring
May 15, 2019

It looks like you did use Arial for a form field at least once, but no fields are now set to Arial. But there's still a reference to it and this is somehow resulting in Acrobat complaining. I managed to correct the file by copying all of the field to a blank page, removing all of the fields from your original and performing a Save As, and copying all of the field from the blank back to the modified original. Note that Preflight (an Acrobat feature) showed some probably unrelated errors, so you may want to regenerate the base PDF using Acrobat rather than Excel's ability to export to PDF.

Inspiring
May 15, 2019

It's almost never a good idea to use Arial in a form field. If you choose Helvetica instead, Adobe Acrobat/Reader use a private version of Arial anyway. This type of font substitution is allowed according to the PDF spec, and Arial is considered to be a suitable replacement for Helvetica.

Also, when you select a non-base-14 font for a form field, the entire font gets embedded, sometimes multiple times, and Arial is a rather large font, so the file gets inflated unnecessarily and problems like the one you're seeing can result. If you simply switch to Helvetica, Acrobat will not remove the unneeded embedded Arial font data when you do a Save As (like it should), and you won't see the expected file size reduction. It's often easier to start from scratch, though there are other methods.

Participant
May 15, 2019

George, not sure this matters but I used Helvetica for all my fields. I used Arial for my text in the form. Same issue?

Inspiring
May 15, 2019

Then it's probably due to some other issue with the PDF. It's hard to say what the problem is without seeing the document and knowing more about how it was created.