Is it possible to replace fonts used in a PDF?

To be clear, the preflight gave me a list of potential font problems, most of which were not important. But I was able to identify the pages on which the offending fonts appeared ("Page 52: WP-MultinationalBCourier 24.0 pt not embedded," or something like that.)

Once I knew the page locations, and the font name and size, it wasn't too hard to locate the specific characters that were using those fonts.

I used the good old fashioned way, as you mentioned (Advanced Editing > Touch-up Text tool > right-click > Properties). In most cases the problems were just some useless thing on the first page of each chapter. Changed them to Arial and got a blank space, no big deal.

However, in four cases they were mathematical symbols that had been replaced by two dots (due to Acrobat's font swapping). After changing to Arial I got completely different symbols. There was no way to know what the original symbols were supposed to be (no access to source documents), so I tracked down a couple of hardware specialists who were able to determine what they should be (a plus/minus symbol and a mu symbol), so I just pasted in unicode versions of those and I was good to go.

Print shop reports that the document is printing. Yay!

Yeah! Good news.
Did you swap them out using the procedure I mentioned earlier, or something different, related to pre-flight?

BarryG

No, it's not embedded.

The good news is that I did I "Preflight" analysis and it found the locations of the offending text. There are only about a dozen locations, and in all cases I was able to identify it just by knowing the page numbers. I swapped them out for regular fonts and hopefully that will fix things.

Hi Ed
There's gotta be a way to search for the font ie what/where it is being used -- I didnt realize the nature of your problem, in that the offending font could be "anywhere."

Check File/Doc properties/Fonts -- you will find the font listed there and can at least determine if said font is embedded or not. From what you say it should not be embedded.

BarryG

Thanks BarryG. I don't think any of that is going to work for me.

I'm using AA 8 (3D).

As I said, the document is over 500 pages, so I don't think I can even track down where the offending font is used. It could be a single character in a table or drawing for all I know. So I'm not going to be able to manually change it since I don't know where the offending text is.

Saving out as a .doc and re-PDFing is also not an option. With a document this big and this complex it would take me days to reformat it.

Hi Ed
I used to spend hours working out the same problems. There's good news and bad news. First though -- what version AA are you using.

Bad news is, unless you can get hold of the exact fonts used to create the pdf -- and then put them on your system -- there will not be much you can do, unless AA has vastly changed their procedures.

Even if you get the exact font and add it to your system, I am still not sure AA will "see" it, depending upon if the font was originally embedded into the pdf or not, when it was made. Logically, it would appear that if not embedded the program would recognize it on the system. But, unfortunately, this has not always worked for me and I do not know why myself.

Unless your required font is something like Hebrew or Chinese, the program will automatically replace your courier to the next likely (internally programmed) selection, so you will not notice any problems. (my experiences & problems were always with foreign languages)

You can replace a font or make a correction by blocking the sentence or word, then using your right-click context menu, then selecting Font, and making the replacement.

Perhaps the best way would be so save the file as another .doc file and start all over again, but with the font your printer will accept?
Is that an option?

let me know.
BarryG