Fonts in PDF defaulting to Adobe Sans (?) when printing via Fiery Command Workstation

Question

I have an intermittent issue with PDFs created from Word 2016. I have Acrobat DC installed and use the "Create PDF" function to make PDFs directly from Word. I use the "High Quality Print" preset which is set to embed all fonts and subset them under 100%. Most of the time everything is fine and the PDFs always look 100% fine on screen.

Occasionally, for a reason I can't fathom, the odd one will turn up that looks fine on screen, prints fine from Acrobat, but when I print it using our preferred method of dragging the file into Fiery Command Workstation, all fonts print as Adobe Sans, which I believe is what Acrobat uses when it can't find the real font. Properties in Acrobat shows the fonts are embedded. They're just default Windows fonts too: Calibri and Corbel, so nothing fancy. I may be incorrect here however I think a restart generally fixes the problem with generating the PDFs however the PDFs with the issue stay that way (I did a test print of one from last month: fine on screen and printed from DC, but font substitution from CWS).

I should say that I have maybe 150 Word documents all created from the same template and perhaps 4 of the PDFs did this, so I'm pretty sure CWS isn't the culprit: it's just highlighting the "something" that is amiss.

Can anything guess as to what might be going on?

Dov Isaacs · Accepted Answer

Let's assume that when you create the PDF files from Word using Acrobat DC's PDFMaker, for the PDF files so-created you have confirmed via the Document Properties Font pane that in fact all fonts are embedded. (It should not make any difference whether the fonts are subset or fully embedded for this purpose!) Furthermore, assume that the PDF files display correctly on screen and when printed directly to a printer via Acrobat's print dialog.

If either of these two assumptions are wrong, resolving those problems (i.e. properly embedding the fonts) would need to be resolved. But we will continue on the basis that the assumptions are correct.

Dragging the PDF files to (or using any other means to submit the files to) an EFI Fiery's Command Workstation does not involve Acrobat in any way whatsoever. Thus, at this point, the problem is not an Acrobat issue at all. However, once the Fiery has the file, any number of things can occur depending upon the Fiery model that you have and options that you select.

For example, some Fiery models provide direct PDF support via Fiery's use of the Adobe PDF Print Engine technology. If your Fiery is so equipped and you configure the Fiery to use that direct PDF option, the PDF is directly RIPed. Whatever font resources are in the PDF should be used directly and absolutely no font substitution should occur. The only case in which font substitution would occur would be if PDF file submitted had fonts that were not embedded in the PDF file.

For Fiery models that don't support the Adobe PDF Print Engine technology (or if you have used options to disable that technology either globally or for the jobs in question, the PDF file is translated into PostScript which is then RIPed using the Fiery's Adobe PostScript 3 interpreter. Again, if all the fonts were properly embedded in the PDF file, no font substitution should occur.

At this point, I think you need to involve EFI Technical Support. What you are describing as symptoms are not something that we have previously heard about either on the Adobe forums or on various printing and prepress forums that we also monitor. Perhaps there is an update to the EFI software that resolves this problem. Maybe there is a configuration issue with your particular EFI Fiery. Or maybe you found a new bug in the EFI software, in which case EFI needs to know about such that they can provide a fix.

We would appreciate knowing what transpires and how the problem gets resolved with the Fiery. Good luck!

- Dov

andrewb38571671 · Answer

Right, now I feel very silly: I was only looking at the files that weren't printing via the Fiery, and this morning looked at another PDF and saw "(embedded)" after the font name, jogging my memory that the dialog shows fonts used whether they are embedded or not. So the fonts were not embedded in those files (apart from a subset of Swiss721, bizarrely, as I don't use it).

Although the files in question were from last month I was reminded of it when we did some last week with a file with our corporate font and Arial Narrow. The corporate font worked but Arial Narrow defaulted. The person creating those particular PDFs had just had their PC re-imaged and this morning I confirmed their PDF settings were back to "Standard" and thus set to not embed certain fonts, of which Arial Narrow is one.

Can't work out why Calibri wasn't embedded in the ones from last month though: I could replicate it by selecting "Smallest file size" however can't imagine the user would have picked this as I set everyone's machine to "High Quality Print" and they wouldn't have changed it manually. The Acrobat add-in on that user's machine was crashing a lot and had to keep being re-enabled at the time though, so perhaps that reset the settings. And it's possible that many of the PDFs are like this (as opposed to just a few) and were just printed via Acrobat so it didn't register as an issue at the time.

So it appears there is no great new mystery to solve: just operator error as usual. Thanks Dov.

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