Just this year we started getting pdf files sent to us, usually a couple out of several hundred, that will print with blanks where characters should be, sometimes in a block like area, sometimes not, just throughout the entire doc, or alternately, sometimes the fonts print as garbage non-sense characters.
If I open the doc in Firefox, the document displays and prints fine but we can't do that for the few that appear out of hundreds since it takes time to find them and figure out which original file is the issue.
I seem to have traced it down to a font issue. The fonts, for whatever reason, are not something being read correctly by Adobe. If I substitute another font things appear. I can even find words even though they appear as white on white. Checking the color of the fonts that don't print, they are supposed to be black. It was almost like there was a color mismatch like you used to see in transparent .gif files when the viewer thought one color was transparent but the files claimed another color was; this would be for black too. Again, we can't substitute fonts for an entire run as that would make formatting changes and garble the information potentially for the others as well as the bad files.
The documents come from a provider that claims it has not altered how they create their pdfs. And, indeed, we haven't changed the way we read the pdfs until this year when we did so, just today, to see if this would counter this problem. We had been using an older version of Acrobat to batch print the jobs.
One item that seems to have fixed some of the issues was digging into the driver for the printer and setting fonts to be downloaded as softfonts. But this didn't solve ALL of the issues.
In the absence of us changing our procedures and software, the provider SUPPOSEDLY not changing what they've done and the printer being the same, I am at a loss. Someone changed something and it's not us.
Has anyone had this issue and how can you solve it without editing each file? If you must run font substitutions, how may this be done to either the select problem files out of hundreds or done in such a way that formatting is not altered?
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