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YannickA
Participant
April 21, 2020
Question

Fonts change when printing PDF with subset embedding

  • April 21, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 71757 views

We create PDF files with font subset embedding that are then consulted by our customers. Unfortunately, some of our customers use old versions of Adobe Acrobat - such as Acrobat XI or 2015. This is due to various constraints on the client side, and can't be changed easily.

 

We have seen that the files we generate (with font subset embedding) will print to paper perfectly correctly when using the latest version of Acrobat Reader DC or Acrobat DC. However, we noticed that some fonts change upon printing to paper when using Adobe Acrobat XI or Adobe Acrobat 2015. I am attaching an example file, as well as how it got printed depending on the version of Acrobat used. You can see that the font changes upon printing when using Acrobat XI or 2015.

 

While this looks minor, it can have an impact in charts or diagrams where exact fonts and spacing can be critical - our customers can be very sensitive to any such changes. We have been trying to understand what is causing the issue/what we could do to make the files work fine with old versions of Acrobat, without success (as far as we can tell, the PDFs are built correctly, and fonts properly embedded). We are wondering what enhancements were made in the latest versions of Acrobat that the problem doesn't occur there (e.g. how was this fixed on the Adobe side?), and what would be a way to fix our currently generated files. Any ideas or input would be very much appreciated.

 

Thank you!

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Y
YannickAAuthor
Participant
April 24, 2020

Just to give an update, I tried something else:

- In Acrobat 2015, I tried to print to file

- Then from the prn file that was generated, I tried to generate a PDF file

 

I then got this error:

%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: | ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

 

In other news, there seems to be a help article from Adobe on this (somehow I can only find it in Japanese), for exactly that issue, but it doesn't provide concrete workarounds... https://helpx.adobe.com/jp/acrobat/kb/223969.html

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    April 22, 2020

    Quite frankly, we are not aware of any such problem of embedded fonts “changing” when printing in older versions of Acrobat. Nor are we aware of any change that would have “fixed” this sort of problem in our latest releases. And since Acrobat 2015 is still officially supported by Adobe, any significant fixes (but not new features) that went into either Acrobat DC or Acrobat 2017 would also have been applied to Acrobat 2015.

     

    I believe that you are seeing some type of issue, the problem is identifying what it is.

     

    Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible from the files you attached what the exact problem is. For example, if you tried “refrying the PDF” by printing the original PDF via the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance (I am assuming Windows is your platform) with both Acrobat 2015 on one system and then with Acrobat DC on another, I would have something to work with. And I would need much more than a page with a single glyph on it! 🙂

     

    I did crack open the file you provided. None of our tools find anything unusual other than use of some funky PDF library that doesn't properly fill in file created, modified, application, and PDF producer information fields.

     

    Also, it would be helpful to ascertain exactly what you (or your customers) are printing to when they encounter this problem. Model? Driver? PostScript or PCL or something else? For anything other than a PostScript printer, I would be concerned about the printer driver itself mucking around with the output somehow. 

     

    Please provide some additional information, plus a more robust file, plus the “refry” results from the Acrobat 2015 version of Acrobat from that more robust file, and I'll try to follow-up on this.

     

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
      Y
      YannickAAuthor
      Participant
      April 23, 2020

      Dov,

       

      Thank you so much for your quick and detailed answer!

       

      On Acrobat 2015, I was under the impression that support had ended earlier this month, but now see that it is still supported. On my computer (unfortunately I am stuck at home with COVID-19, and am forced to test things with trial versions of both Acrobat 2020 and 2015 on my home computer), I have made sure to have the latest updates installed on both. Also, very good information that there were no (intentional at least) changes that would affect font printing between 2015 and 2020 versions - this is what we were mostly after, hoping that what made our files print to paper fine in Acrobat 2020 could be identified.

       

      This time around, I am attaching a file with a bit more text (and also it's the original file that our system generates - I had run the previous file through a random library last time, as you saw, to see whether pinting issues would still occur, which they did). Reproducing this issue is hard, and we haven't found a good pattern, but it seems Times New Roman numbers are easily affected. Customers have also reported issues with some Japanese text and associated Japanese fonts as well. On our side, Times New Roman is the easiest to reproduce with.

       

      Here are the files I am attaching:

      - FontPrintingIssue.docx : FYI, the sample Word file I am using

      - FontPrintingIssue_original.pdf : the PDF file our system generates based on the above Word file. It prints to paper fine with Acrobat 2020, but the fonts change as per below image in Acrobat 2015.

      - FontPrintingIssues_WhatChanges.png : within that sample file, the characters that have their font change when printing (from what I can tell) when the problem arises

      - FontPrintingIssue_SaveAsAdobePDF(FromWord).pdf : file generated by PDFMaker when using Save As Adobe PDF in Word (this is with Acrobat 2015). This file does not have issues when printing to paper.

      - FontPrintingIssue_CreateFromFileAdobe2020.pdf : file generated by Acrobat from the Word file using Create From feature in Acrobat 2020. This file does not have issues when printing to paper.

      - FontPrintingIssue_AdobePDFPrinter(Printed from PDF using Adobe PDF printer 2015).pdf: Opening up the original PDF file in Acrobat 2015 and printing using Adobe PDF printer. This file does not have issues when printing to paper.

      - FontPrintingIssue_SaveAsPDF_Using PDF File in Acrobat 2015.pdf: Opening up the original PDF file in Acrobat 2015 and saving as PDF. This file does not have issues when printing to paper in Acrobat 2020, but fonts change when printing to paper in Acrobat 2015.

      - FontPrintingIssue_SaveAsPDF_Using PDF File in Acrobat 2020.pdf: Opening up the original PDF file in Acrobat 2020 and saving as PDF. This file does not have issues when printing to paper in Acrobat 2020, but fonts change when printing to paper in Acrobat 2015.

      - FontPrintingIssue_PostScriptFromAcrobat2015.ps :  opening the original PDF file and saving as PS in Acrobat 2015. The PDF file then generated by Adobe Distiller does not have issues printing to paper.

      - FontPrintingIssue_PostScriptFromAcrobat2020.ps : opening the original PDF file and saving as PS in Acrobat 2020.  The PDF file then generated by Adobe Distiller does not have issues printing to paper.

       

      In terms of printer, I am stuck with using my home printer to test right now as I am unable to get to the office due to COVID-19 (Brother DCP-J925N, which I believe uses PCL drivers - I have also tested with a Fuji-Xerox DocuCenter-VII C4473 when I could still go to the office, but again I believe these are PCL drivers). From what we've heard, customers have tested separately with multiple printers across multiple brands, but we don't know at this stage how many printers they tested on, their brand and make, or the drivers used.

       

      My apologies, as my Acrobat-Fu is near non-existant... So I hope I have attached the files you requested. From the above, all I can tell is that there seems to be something wrong with the PDF file that we generate, at least as seen from Adobe Acrobat 2015. Adobe Acrobat 2020 doesn't have any issue. Files generated by Adobe using the same source Word file are fine. We must be missing something when we generate the PDF file, we just have no idea what. Or Acrobat 2020 somehow communicates better with printers.

       

      Thank you so much for your help!

       

      Yannick

       

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