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Anonymous
August 5, 2019
Answered

Possible to display Russian text in PDF without embedded font?

  • August 5, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 4069 views

Hi Everyone,

We plan to create PDF in Russian language and according to most resources, the embedded font is needed, and we know how to do that already, with the only concern on the increased PDF file size. Since we already observed that Chinese PDF can be created without embedded font given that a proper Chinese encoding has been specified in PDF and the user has installed the standard Chinese font for Adobe Reader, which seem to work here. Therefore we are keen to know if Russian PDF can be created in the same way without extra font embedded?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Dov Isaacs

Quite frankly, if we had to do it over again over 25 years later, we would never have allowed for referenced (i.e., not embedded) fonts in PDF files. Assuming that the computer (including phones, tablets, whatever) receiving a PDF file has the same fonts installed that were used for composing the text that went into a particular PDF file or that there are “substitution fonts” with all the glyphs, encoding, and compatible advance widths and similar metrics is a crap shoot at best!

For example, the substitution fonts provided by Adobe Reader and Acrobat do not provide support for Cyrillic.

And even if you have totally unembedded Arial and/or Times New Roman fonts referenced in your PDF file, you are at the mercy of what is installed on the receiving system. There are many different versions of Arial and Times New Roman font families “in the wild” ranging from support for fewer than 256 glyphs and only Western Latin languages to the most recent Windows 10 versions of same that have over 5000 glyphs and support not only Western Latin languages, but also Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and more. But again, the problem is that you don't know what fonts the recipient of your PDF file has installed.

In the most recent versions of Adobe Acrobat DC, the Standard joboptions have been modified to require subset embedding of all fonts unless the fonts in question are tagged to prohibit embedding (NOTE that we have a description for such fonts that prohibit embedding in PDF and that is “useless”!). For Adobe's graphic arts applications including InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, subset font embedding occurs regardless of the joboptions specified.

Bottom line is that it is foolish to avoid a few extra bytes of PDF file size by not subset embedding fonts. Unless you are using a ridiculous number of fonts and a large complement, the size of a PDF file is typically not increased by more than 50 to 100KB when all fonts are subset embedded. Are the problems that the recipients of a PDF file worth those few extra bytes saved by not embedding? Absolutely not!

          - Dov

2 replies

Dov Isaacs
Dov IsaacsCorrect answer
Legend
August 5, 2019

Quite frankly, if we had to do it over again over 25 years later, we would never have allowed for referenced (i.e., not embedded) fonts in PDF files. Assuming that the computer (including phones, tablets, whatever) receiving a PDF file has the same fonts installed that were used for composing the text that went into a particular PDF file or that there are “substitution fonts” with all the glyphs, encoding, and compatible advance widths and similar metrics is a crap shoot at best!

For example, the substitution fonts provided by Adobe Reader and Acrobat do not provide support for Cyrillic.

And even if you have totally unembedded Arial and/or Times New Roman fonts referenced in your PDF file, you are at the mercy of what is installed on the receiving system. There are many different versions of Arial and Times New Roman font families “in the wild” ranging from support for fewer than 256 glyphs and only Western Latin languages to the most recent Windows 10 versions of same that have over 5000 glyphs and support not only Western Latin languages, but also Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and more. But again, the problem is that you don't know what fonts the recipient of your PDF file has installed.

In the most recent versions of Adobe Acrobat DC, the Standard joboptions have been modified to require subset embedding of all fonts unless the fonts in question are tagged to prohibit embedding (NOTE that we have a description for such fonts that prohibit embedding in PDF and that is “useless”!). For Adobe's graphic arts applications including InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, subset font embedding occurs regardless of the joboptions specified.

Bottom line is that it is foolish to avoid a few extra bytes of PDF file size by not subset embedding fonts. Unless you are using a ridiculous number of fonts and a large complement, the size of a PDF file is typically not increased by more than 50 to 100KB when all fonts are subset embedded. Are the problems that the recipients of a PDF file worth those few extra bytes saved by not embedding? Absolutely not!

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
T
Test Screen Name
Legend
August 5, 2019

Embedded fonts are now recommended for all languages and situations. But will it work without embedding? It depends on the viewer, and the fonts it happens to use to display. I don't think you could rely on it. So, do embed in this case.

There is no "standard default Russian/CE font" for Acrobat Reader. The reason for default Japanese/Chinese/Korean fonts is that each font is several megabytes, which 20 years ago was intolerable.

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