Bizarre font substitution problem

[sincere_Radiance16B8]

Hi Acrobat forum readers:

Is there any way to utterly force Adobe PDF's printer driver to use only document-specified fonts that are installed at the system level and stop printer font substitution?

I am having a thorny and bizarre font substitution problem with Microsoft Word 2016.

• I designed a corporate identity for a company that deals with education publishing.
• I specified using "ITC Century Std" as a standard font in the identity.
• When we view a test document I created on screen in MS Word, there are 3 lines of text at the bottom of the page after a subheading. (see attached JPEG Word screenshot)
• When you print that document to either Adobe PDF as a printer or to any paper laser printer, there are suddenly 5 lines of text at the bottom of the page after the same subheading! And more bizarre, every single line on the page has the exact same line ending (even hyphenated words are identical).

At first, I thought it must be a font substitution problem, or a margin change problem.

Then, I did a little digging, and sure enough "New Century Schoolbook" is a standard printer font installed on virtually every printer on the market. Its italic is rather different than the italic in ITC Century Std. And when I look at the PDF created and the paper prints of the document, the italic is indeed that of the built-in Century Schoolbook font rather than ITC's. So, font substitution is definitely the problem....Century Schoolbook's x-height and fit are slightly smaller, too, hence more lines fitting on the page (without changing line endings?!)

Just to test, I went in to the document and changed the "Normal" style to use Century Schoolbook as the font instead of ITC's Century, and the problems went away on both paper laser prints and also Adobe PDFs.

When you look at the Properties of the incorrect PDF file printed to the Adobe PDF printer from Word, it says in the Fonts tab that the Postscript version of ITC Century is used in the document. But, the fonts are actually Century Schoolbook (as evidenced by the italic)! So, not only is a font substitution happening, it's displaying the properties of the fonts I specified in Word, but which are not being honored in the PDF. Bizarre.

So, I went into both my Dell laser printer's driver and the Adobe PDF printer driver, and I changed the Postscript option from "Substitute Device Font" to the "Download as Softfont" option......which, as I understand it, is supposed to FORCE the printer to honor the application's specified fonts.....But, it did not work. The files still swap the ITC Century for Century Schoolbook.

I have attached:

• screenshot from MS Word
• JPEG of the Adobe PDF showing different line

SCREENSHOT FROM WORD:

JPEG of the file made through the ADOBE PDF printer driver:

[Dov Isaacs]

On behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated:

dishdesigner‌,

There is no question that you are actually achieving the results that you say you are and display with you samples. The problem that we are having is that we cannot directly reproduce that behaviour and that what you believe is the source of the problem is not how the driver works.

I installed a copy of the Adobe versions (from Font Folio 11.1) of ITC Century Std, both the regular (book) and the Book Italic faces on my Windows system. The Adobe version of these ITC fonts may differ from ITC Century Std offerings from other sources, so that may be a variable here.

I created a Microsoft Word 2016 document using both these typefaces. I then generated PDF files in two ways, the first being via Acrobat DC PDFMaker (the save as Adobe PDF function in Word) and also by printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance. In both cased, the correct ITC Century Std fonts were used and embedded in the PDF file.

What is more interesting is that for the Adobe PDF PostScript Printer Driver instance, the only “printer fonts” as seen in the PPD file for the Distiller are four faces of Courier and one face of Symbol. The driver cannot possibly do font replacement of any fonts other than Courier and Symbol and even those we don't substitute.

But even more interesting is the fact that for standard PostScript printers, per Windows standard Font Mapping table in the Windows Registry (key Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shard Tools\Font Mapping), there is no mapping of ITC Century Std (or anything like that) to any font. Century Schoolbook (a TrueType font shipped with Windows) is mapped to NewCenturySchlbk, but you aren't using the system's TrueType Century Schoolbook.

The key to what actually may be happening is your statement that When you look at the Properties of the incorrect PDF file printed to the Adobe PDF printer from Word, it says in the Fonts tab that the Postscript version of ITC Century is used in the document. That tells us that the driver did not do any font substitution. What may be happening is that if the font is not embedded in the PDF file, font substitution may be occurring.

When you look at the fonts under font properties, does it indicate embedded or subset embedded? If not substitution may be being done by Acrobat. Check your Acrobat Preferences (Ctrl-K) under Page Display. Make sure that you have checked Use local fonts. If that is not checked, check it and then reopen your problematic PDF file? Does it display correctly now?

If it does display correctly, one thing you should be doing is always embedding all fonts in your PDF files. This is controlled by the joboptions you specify with either PDFMaker or for the Printer Properties of the Adobe PDF PostScript Printer Driver instance. Some of the supplied joboptions don't embed fonts. (You might want to try using the High Quality Print joboptions!!)

If you already had the Use local fonts option enabled and/or the fonts were actually embedded in the PDF file, at this point we are stumped since we can't duplicate the problem otherwise.

           - Dov

PS:  Assuming you are using Acrobat DC, you really should be using the PDFMaker feature of Acrobat instead of producing PDF via distillation of PostScript. It is much more reliable and high quality, preserving color management, transparency, and image attributes.

[sincere_Radiance16B8]

Thanks for the thoughts and insights, Dov!

To further your inquiry, I have posted a ZIP file of both the original MS Word file and the Acrobat file that was generated from it in my Dropbox folder if you care to open the Word file and try to create your own PDF from it. You can also inspect the original PDF file's embedded fonts. They are located at:

Dropbox - Lauren_Gale Proposal for Washington County Schools.zip

To your thoughts:

• I am definitely using Adobe's version of ITC Century Std (version 1.018 to be exact). The fonts are actually OpenType in the Postscript flavor.
• The original PDF that alerted us to the problem has the fonts embedded as subsets (it's in the ZIP file).
• Our Acrobat page display preferences all already had "Use Local Fonts" checked.
• The original offending PDF from the original Word file was made through printing to the Adobe PDF printer. I also do the same instead of using Word's "Save As PDF" option (Acrobat DC PDFMaker).....the reason is that PDFMaker crashes Word 2016 every time I try it! (I have seen other users with the same issue in online forums...haven't had time to research it fully, so for now, I have to disable the plugin.)

To further the testing:

• Just to see what happened, I reprinted the original Word file to Adobe PDF, but this time I checked "Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts." Then, I also made sure the PDF settings had Font embedding unchecked as well. You would think then that the resulting PDF would swap Adobe's ITC Century for something like Times. But no....the resulting PDF still shows ITC Century (PS) as an embedded subset font in Properties!?
• Perhaps more interesting, I also swapped out the Normal style in the Word document to use the standard Windows system TrueType Century Schoolbook font instead of Adobe ITC Century Std. Sure enough, the file showed 4 lines at the end of the 1st page after the subheading, and that's exactly what came out in the resulting PDF....4 lines. The system TrueType Century Schoolbook worked perfectly....

I really hope I don't have to switch their corporate font standard to use MS TT Century Schoolbook just to make page breaks work correctly without reflowing the document in resulting PDFs! The system version is quite clunky compared to the Adobe version, especially in the italic (flat bracketed serifs instead of curved italic serifs).....

Any insight you could glean from the original files would be appreciated!

Best,

Darrin Hunter

[Dov Isaacs]

Darrin,

I'll grab the files today and take a look.

With regards to problems with PDFMaker and Office 2016, the problem was a bug introduced by Microsoft in their previous update to Office 2016. The bug has now been fixed by Microsoft as of last weekend and if you update your Office 2016 / Office 365, you'll note that Word no longer crashes when using PDFMaker.

None the less, the problem that you are encountering shouldn't occur and I'll follow up with your samples.

Thanks for your patience and especially your discipline in providing detailed symptom information! 

         - Dov

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Darrin,

I've downloaded your .ZIP file, extracted your files, installed both the ITC Century Std and OpenSans font families and repeated the experiments on my system.

Attached to this posting are two PDF files, the first the result of printing to the AdobePDF PostScript Printer Driver instance and the second the result of using PDFMaker in Word 2016 (fully updated).

My observations:

• The two PDF files that I generated are pretty identical in terms of layout, fonts used, and general visual appearance.
  
  
• Internally inspecting the PDF files, the Century Std fonts embedded in the PDF files absolutely match the fonts that I installed and that are invoked in the Word document. Visually, the PDF file text in the Century Std fonts totally match the glyphs defined in the ITC Century Std fonts.
  
  
• The PDF file you sent me matches the PDF file I generate with the exception that in your file, Arial is not embedded probably due to your use of joboptions that don't embed so-called “system fonts.”
  
  
• Yes, there is a difference in pagination and formatting between how the Word document appears on screen and the resultant PDF files or for that matter, printed output. This has been an issue with Microsoft Office products since they first came out. Formatting for output is done within the Office applications, not within the driver or PDFMaker and takes into account the printable area of the page (i.e., the page size less the area of the non-printable margins), some obscure Type 1 and/or OpenType CFF font metrics (especially when dealing with professional fonts as opposed to the fonts distributed by Microsoft with Windows and Office) as well as the current device's resolution. (I've been at Adobe for nearly 26 years and no one at Microsoft seems to see this as an issue worth fixing!) This is exactly why for work that absolutely depends on precise, dependable formatting, Microsoft Office products including Word and Publisher are at best unreliable. I wish it was otherwise!        
  
  
• On my system, the visual appearance of the text formatted in ITC Century Std fonts in Word does match what I see in the PDF files in Acrobat.

Bottom line is that other than the relayout issue which Adobe can do nothing about (it's not in our code, the layout is done in Office), I am not seeing any problem.

          - Dov

[sincere_Radiance16B8]

Thanks so much for taking the time to investigate, Dov!

I appreciate the expertise...

I'm not surprised to hear that working between Word and PDF is not always a WYSIWYG experience. Unfortunately, when a graphic designer designs an identity for corporate use, the folks down in the trenches are almost never publishing on the Adobe platform. Word is always the lowest common denominator of staff training and layout tool availability.

So, issues like this cause my corporate clients fits when they finalize long documents in Word, complete with page and column breaks based on their WYSIWYG expectations. Then, printing or creating a PDF causes blank columns and pages to appear when lines are bumped and they can't understand what's happened. That's when I usually get the irate phone calls as they are trying to send a document out on a deadline!

Interestingly, looking at your two PDFs, the font encoding is different.

The AdobePDF version uses "Custom" encoding for the Type 1 Century font embedded while the PDFMaker version uses ANSI encoding.....I can't imagine that would cause linefit or letterfit changes to the page, though.

Your comment about how "Formatting for output...within the Office applications...takes into account....the current device's resolution." struck me. I used to see conversations about how Word would render onscreen layout based on the currently set printer, and that to change that, you simply needed to choose a different target printer / device and then click "Done" without printing for it to render based on that new device....Perhaps that is something we should investigate, but I no longer see a way to change the target print device (other than hit Print, change the device, then Cancel....)

We'll be able to find a working solution from here - thanks again.

Best,

Darrin Hunter

[Dov Isaacs]

Glad to be able to help ...

FWIW, “Font” is a four letter word beginning with an ‘F’ …    

[monicag3125663]

Back in the day we use to have problems with fonts and printers.

We used to convert text into path before sending it to the final print and that helped us avoid the printer-font issues.

We usually recorded one ps with the actual font and sent the printer one in text in path.

M.-

[Dov Isaacs]

This issue had absolutely nothing to do with “fonts and printers.”

Acrobat assumes nothing with regards to any fonts that may or may not be resident in a printer and embeds font definitions in all output for PostScript printing and has the operating system driver embed such fonts for non-PostScript devices.

This topic was associated with issues with Microsoft Word which is not an application in which you can “convert text into paths” (a process also known as “outlining text”) at all. And even for applications which provide for this, Adobe and most responsible experts in the graphic arts community most strongly advise against this practice except where such outlining is required for special graphic arts effects that cannot be achieved through normal text manipulation (stretching, rotating, obliquing, etc.)

The side effects of outlining text include:

●     Degraded print quality (overly-bold, blotchiness, etc.) at smaller text sizes due to the loss of intelligent scaling utilizing the fonts' “hinting” mechanism.

●     Bloated spool file sizes and PDF file sizes.

●     PDF files for which text is not searchable and not editable.

The fact is that problems with printing due to bad fonts are few and far between. If the font displays correctly in Adobe Reader / Acrobat, the likelihood is exceptionally rare that there will be any problem printing using that font especially when using standard, commercial fonts.

          - Dov