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CMYK123
Participant
December 3, 2009
Question

Myriad pro "ys" printing bold on windows printer

  • December 3, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 1928 views

I recently designed a huge media kit for my newspaper. The project was created in InDesign v.2 on my Mac  and the only font I used was versions of Myriad Pro - regular, bold, condensed, etc. I made pdfs and sent them to the salespeople who all use Windows computers and printers. They complained that when they printed the pages, the "y" in the body text (Myriad Pro Regular) would print in bold, although the text was not intended to be bold. I printed from my Mac to various printers here with no problems.

Does anyone know what is causing the issue and how it can be fixed? Is this a Windows compatibility issue? It only happens with Myriad. No other fonts have this problem.

If I can't correct the problem, I may be forced to redo my design and change body text to Helvetica

Any insight would greatly be appreciated.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    December 3, 2009

    By "InDesign v.2" do you mean InDesign 2.0 or InDesign CS2 (which is really InDesign 4)?

    How did you create the PDF file? The preferred method is "export PDF" and not via distillation of PostScript. However, if the latter, did you embed all fonts or not?

    Printing from Acrobat/Reader is not platform dependent. Printing from Windows should not yield any different results. The issue may, though, be related to whether fonts are embedded in the PDF file.

    Do all your salespeople have problems printing or just some? And what are they using to print the PDF files from - Acrobat, Reader, something else? And what version of same? What type of printers are they printing to?

    Provide more info and we can perhaps assist you better.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    C
    CMYK123Author
    Participant
    December 3, 2009

    Thanks for your answer. I am using InDesign CS2. I did preflight on my document and found that in the fonts area under embedded, myriad was listed as just "OK" and not "Yes." Does that make any difference?

    When I created the pdf from InDesign, I selected "smallest file size" because it needs to be small for e-mailing but I now learned that all fonts aren't embedded this way. Yet, when I opened the pdf in Acrobat Pro, under PDF Optimizer and looked at fonts, it said myriad fonts were all embedded.

    Our salespeople are in different offices and they are using Acrobat 7 or 8 to print from a Windows platform. The "y" issue isn't happening on every page in every text block. To test it, I printed from my windows computer and saw where the y's were going bold.

    I then opened the original InDesign document and found that in every instance where the y was printing funny, it seemed to be because the text was scaled to 90 percent. When I changed to 100 percent, the problem was resolved in all but one instance.

    I appreciate assistance. I have never before had a problem with fonts not printing on a PDF and I am at a loss.

    The one person in the entire company who is a wiz at Macs suggested I create a postscript file then distill. Why is that not a good idea?

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    December 3, 2009

    The PostScript generated by InDesign is optimized for printing, not for distilling into PDF. Also, PDF via distillation of PostScript loses color management and live transparency; this is not a recommended workflow!

    I'd personally be very interested in seeing a small sample, both in terms of the InDesign document and resultant PDF, that exhibits this problem. If you could send same to me via e-mail (click on my ID), I could check this out here at Adobe.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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