Acrobat DC: Doesn't see all font variations installed!

[pixelwrangler]

Acrobat DC (CC), latest update. Winfdows 7 Pro 64 bit.

I have the Adobe font Avenir installed on this,machine. It was copied over from my Adobe Font Folio 9 CD. The variations/weights that are seen to be available in editing an Acrobat document are:

Avenir 35

Avenir 45

Avenir 55

Avenir 65

Whereas, in all other CC apps that I use on a regular basis (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop...) the Avenir variations available are seen as:

Avenir 45 Book

Avenir 45 Book Oblique

Avenir 65 Medium

Avenir 65 Medium Oblique

Avenir 95 Black

Avenir 95 Black Oblique

Avenir 35 Light

Avenir 35 Light Oblique

Avenir 55 Roman

Avenir 55 Oblique

Avenir 85 Heavy

Avenir 85 Heavy Oblique

While I realize that Acrobat DC just uses the Italic button to access those variations, what happened to Avenir 85 (Heavy) and Avenir 95 (Black) ? Why are they not available in Acrobat DC?

It could not possibly be an embedding issue. Anyone?

TIA!

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

This is absolutely not an issue of embedding. And for that matter, since the fonts you are discussing are the old, legacy Type 1 fonts, there weren't any embedding permissions flags in the fonts to concern yourself with.

The real issue is that for standard Windows applications that don't enumerate their own fonts, font families that have more than just the four regular, italic, bold, and bold italic typefaces are fairly problematic. In order to ensure full compatibility with all applications, font vendors typically do some fairly strange mapping. This mapping is indeed inconsistent with InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop which show you the full and proper font names and styles.

Acrobat, for better or worse, for the text touch-up editing and forms edit capabilities, has chosen compatibility with the typical enterprise applications for font selection on the basis that these activities are more likely to be performed by Office users as opposed to graphic artists.

To your point about the full Avenir family from Font Folio 9, the mapping is as follows:

          Avenir 35 Light ￫ Avenir 35 Light

          Avenir 35 Light,ITALIC ￫ Avenir 35 Light Oblique

          Avenir 45 Book ￫ Avenir 45 Book

          Avenir 45 Book,ITALIC ￫ Avenir 45 Book Oblique

          Avenir 65 Medium ￫ Avenir 65 Medium

          Avenir 65 Medium,BOLD ￫ Avenir 95 Black

          Avenir 65 Medium,ITALIC ￫ Avenir 65 Medium Oblique

          Avenir 65 Medium,BOLDITALIC ￫ Avenir 95 Black Oblique

          Avenir 55 Roman ￫ Avenir 55 Roman

          Avenir 55 Roman,BOLD ￫ Avenir 85 Heavy

          Avenir 55 Roman,ITALIC ￫ Avenir 55 Oblique

          Avenir 55 Roman,BOLDITALIC ￫ Avenir 85 Heavy Oblique

This information comes from the README.txt files in Avenir 1 and Avenir 2 directories of Font Folio 9. Information for such mapping is in the README.txt files for other families as well.

Hopefully this solves your issue and gives you some background as to what is actually going on here (even if you and I don't particularly like it)!

          - Dov