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J
jean-guy_4614
Participant
September 2, 2025
Question

Font handled differently between PDF printer and Word Add-in when generating PDF from Word

  • September 2, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 182 views

I genreate a PDF from a word document using the PDF Printer and a standard Adobe printing profile (High Quality Print). Now I need to generate the same file, but with bookmarks and links, so I'm using the Word Add-in instead (from the Word ribbon).

A specific font is generating gibberish. In the past, because I'm using language specific fonts (for Hindi, Arabic and Hebrew) I added the Windows User font folder to the distiller so that Adobe will look at both places (Windows/Fonts & "User"/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Fonts).

This time it's not working. I see the font listed in the font list when I edit the generated PDF file, however, applying the font has no impact, the gibberish remains. This is a Hebrew font called David. If I use Arial Unicode or Times, the Hebrew script comes out fine, but it looks different and my client prefers the David font.

 

Why can't Adobe handle that font in one case (Word Add-in), but it can handle it fine in the other case (PDF Printer)?

1 reply

Souvik Sadhu
Community Manager
Souvik SadhuCommunity Manager
Community Manager
September 3, 2025

Hi @jean-guy_4614,

 

Hope you are doing well. Sorry for your experience working with PDFs created through Word.

 

From the description, it seems that there is an issue with how the MS Word add-in for creating PDFs handles font embedding in the document.

Have you tried using the Adobe PDF printer > Advanced > Fonts > checking the checkboxes saying "Embed all fonts" and "Embed Open Type fonts" > then trying to work with the PDF?

 

If this doesn't work, please share a sample PDF along with the sorry file with us so we can try to test the issue in-house and get back to you.

 

Look forward to hearing from you.


Regards,
Souvik.

J
jean-guy_4614Author
Participant
September 3, 2025

Hello and thank you for taking the time to reply.

 

Whilst double-checking about the embedding settings, I realized what was going on.

A few months ago, when I had this issue with a different non-built in Hindi font, I created a "PDF Conversion Setting" profile without font embedding to do some tests. Somehow, my Word Add-in was stuck on that profile. I deleted that test profile and pointed the Add-in to the proper profile and everything worked as expected.

 

But I do have two questions:

  1. See the attached screen capture. You'll notice that the option Embed Open Type Fonts is disabled. Why? Is this normal?
  2. Also, on that screen capture, you'll see that the font I'm using (David) is listed as available in my user folder. It was available and Adobe is seeing it. So, even if embedding was off, why didn't Adobe find the font while doing the file conversion from Word to PDF and give appropriate results?

 

FInally, it seems that font embeding is a must, are there circumstances when we would want embedding off?

(I guess I had three questions, not two, sorry!)

 

Thanks again!

 

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