Embedding fonts

[alicel63009187]

Good morning, desperately seeking some help on embedding fonts and hoping someone from this community can help!

I have a pdf document generated from Canva. Canva doesn’t embed fonts when generating pdf (dont ask, that in itself seems silly for a company that tries to make print ready documents).

I have Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. When I run a preflight on it, there are a few fonts that won’t embed and in the properties it just says Type 3. I believe that these are the Cooper Hewitt and Glacial Indifference fonts that I have used in Canva.

I have gone online and downloaded these fonts and put them in my Mac user library (fonts) as well as putting the folder in Font Book (Im not clear on the difference but I read somewhere that I should do this?).

Acrobat still doesnt seem to be able to embed them. I notice that adobe uses Creative Cloud and I can download some additional fonts into my creative cloud account (although not these fonts). Is there a way I can import these fonts to creative cloud? Is there another way to skin the cat? I have no idea how to resolve this but I definitely need to embed these fonts and want to avoid having to redo the whole document in a different font.

Any advice would be very much appreciated!!

[Abambo]

Is the font embeddable? Type 3 fonts are using a quite old font format but I had to read about that beforehand, as I have never seen this.

You may try to output your Canva file to postscript and use distiller to create the PDF file.

[Test Screen Name]

Type 3 fonts are always embedded. It’s impossible to be anything else. So... let‘s Go back. What leads you to conclude that you have type 3 fonts that are not embedded?

[defaultct468l0u7757]

Hi there - did you find a solution to this.  I've got exactly the same issue but with different fonts.

Thanks

Mike

[Luke Jennings3]

Did you try using the embed fonts preflight? If you can't embed the needed fonts, but have them on your computer, try creating a new PDF that uses the needed fonts, combine the new PDF with the original PDF, then try the embed preflight again, if it works, delete the unwanted pages.

[Test Screen Name]

If you have exacrly the same issue, then I have exactly the same reply. "Type 3 fonts are always embedded. It’s impossible to be anything else. So... let‘s Go back. What leads you to conclude that you have type 3 fonts that are not embedded?"

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Hi @alicel63009187,

What makes you think your fonts are Type 3?

From the www.1001Fonts.com website, they are OTF (OpenType) fonts with an open source SIL user license. See:

• https://www.1001fonts.com/glacial-indifference-font.html
• https://www.1001fonts.com/cooper-hewitt-font.html

There's a huge difference between Type 3 (an outdated type of PostScript font) and OpenType. Sometimes, depending upon how the PDF was created, OpenType fonts will be listed as PostScript T1 or T3 fonts in the font tab of Acrobat's File Properties.

If your versions of the fonts are open source with a SIL license, then technically they can be embeded into your PDF. The license allows this.

The question is why aren't they being embedded.

Quesitons to you:

1. In which folder(s) did you install the fonts on your Mac?
2. What method did you use to create the PDF from Canva? Please give us the exact steps.
3. Was there a checkbox in that method to embed all fonts?

FYI, Canva is an extremely limited program that has many "shortcomings" and making PDFs is one. I know, it's cute as a bunny and has some great templates, but it doesn't have the chops to do the job right for print, press, accessible PDF, and other formats required by our industry. If you can't afford Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress (pro-grade programs), have you considered Affinity Designer? Much cheaper and it meets industry requirements.

Please keep in mind that this is an Adobe user-to-user forum so we'll help as best we can, but:

• Canva is not an Adobe product.
• The PDF file format is open source, and no longer owned by Adobe.
• The fonts you're using are not by Adobe.
• But Acrobat DC Pro is an Adobe program!

[defaulty1j7024hqgt0]

Hello, I found out how to resolve this issue. The issue is the actual font style that you choose when designing your Canva document. I ran a test and checked the properties on 2 of my documents, the document that did not give me embedded issues had a font style of "Open Sans", but when I used another font style the embed did not work. I a nutshell as it seems only fonts like "Open Sans" will be embedded on Canva to PDF.

Hope this helps!

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

And one reason why Open Sans worked is because it is an open source font, which means it's covered by an open source license that does not prevent it from being embedded into a PDF.

Choose your font carefully and wisely.

[Shawn Anderson]

I've run into this before on several customer supplied PDFs from Canva. It looks like, under certain circumstances, Canva PDF export will convert fonts to Type 3 when exporting. Is a crap shoot if they will really print, many times they come out as bullets instead of the actual text.

We have seen it happen with fonts that we know are only available in newer formats like OTF, so the font didn't start out as Type 3. Might be because of font licensing restrictions but its hard to tell. Many times the font has lost its original name and comes out as T3font1, etc. I'm guessing its something to do with the engine Canva uses to make PDFs.  I remember getting some PDFs from TeX/LaTex a long time ago that did something like that with Postscript Type 1 fonts as well. 

Our fix was to make a fixup in an Acrobat preflight profile that converts any Type 3 font to outlines, and run that when we get files like this. So far that's the only thing I've seen that touches it.