Preflight: Arabische, Asiatische, Hebräische Schriften

Hello @jansmz,

Thank you for raising this. It’s a great question and an important use case, especially when working with multilingual documents in production or archival workflows. Let me tell you, I personally don't have much experience with this use case. I am suggesting the following, and it may or may not help.

Acrobat Preflight does offer the ability to inspect and validate font usage, but identifying specific scripts like Arabic, Hebrew, or Asian fonts may require:

• A custom Preflight profile or fix-up that checks for fonts known to support RTL or CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters

• Validation of Unicode ranges or specific font names used in those languages

Currently, Acrobat doesn’t include a predefined fix-up to specifically detect “Arabic” or “Hebrew” fonts by script category, but you can:

1. Use Preflight > Fonts to view which fonts are embedded or missing
2. Create a custom Preflight profile that flags specific font names (e.g., “Arial Unicode MS”, “Tahoma”, “SimSun”, “Noto Naskh Arabic”)
3. Use the Text Object Inspector to check character codes and script indicators

Steps to Create the Custom Preflight Check in Acrobat Pro (latest version):

1. Open Preflight:

• Go to Tools > Print Production > Preflight

2. Switch to “Fixups” or “Profiles”:

• At the top, click the “Profiles” or “Fixups” tab, depending on what you’re trying to build.

   

  • For this, select “Profiles”, then click “Options > Create Profile…”

   

3. Name Your Custom Profile:

• Give it a name like:

  Check for Arabic, Hebrew, or Asian fonts

• Optional: Add a description

  "Flags PDFs that include fonts used in RTL or CJK script families."

4. Add a New Check:

• Inside the profile dialog, click “New Check” under the Fonts section.

• Choose “Fonts used in the document” as the basis.

• Click “Edit Condition”.

Sample Condition Configuration:

Under the Check Condition, set something like:

Condition name: Font matches Arabic/Hebrew/CJK families

Check type:

The name of the font used in the document

Match type:

Contains any of the following

Values to match (enter font names):

text

Noto Naskh Arabic

Amiri

Traditional Arabic

David Libre

FrankRuehl

Miriam

SimSun

MS Gothic

MingLiU

Batang

KaiU

You can add or remove fonts based on your organizational font policies or usage.

5. Save and Run:

• Click OK to save the check.

• Save your profile.

• Back in the Preflight window, search for your profile by name.

• Select it and click Analyze (or Fix, if there’s a fixup included).

Optional: Add an Error Message or Instruction

You can configure the check to display a message like:

“This PDF contains one or more fonts associated with Arabic, Hebrew, or Asian script families.”

You can also change it to “fail” the check if those fonts are not supposed to be used.

Limitations:

• This method doesn’t detect text direction (e.g., RTL) or actual Unicode script ranges — only font names.

• Embedded fonts may appear with PostScript names instead of user-friendly ones, so double—check the actual embedded font names via Preflight > PDF analysis > Font listing first.

• If a font is a subset, it may show as NotoNaskhArabic+XYZ123.

If you are able to make it possible, please update this discussion so other can benefit from it.

Thanks again for bringing this up; this is a valuable use case that we’ll also share with the Preflight team for future consideration.