Font Prints Garbled in Win10 & Acrobat X, but Fine in Win7

[PKS-GSR94]

I just recently built and installed my company's first Win10 workstations a couple of weeks ago - 2 workstations total.  Everything else in the office is Win7 x64, and everyone is using Acrobat X 10.1.16 (latest version).

We recently noticed that any document printed to PDF on the Win10 machines using the Acrobat distiller, containing the BankGothic Lt BT TrueType font will have that font swapped for Courier, with the output all scrambled.  All of our other office standard fonts like Calibri (OpenType) and Century Gothic (TrueType) all appear correct when printed on the Win10 machines.  The BankGothic font also looks fine when printed on the WIn7 machines.  When checking Properties > Fonts, a document printed in WIn7 will show the BankGothic TrueType font among others, but the same document printed from Win10 will show Courier substituted for the BankGothic font.

I discovered that on Win10 machines, if I UNCHECK the option in the Acrobat distiller preferences for "Rely on System Fonts Only; Do Not Use Document Fonts", then the document DOES print correctly with the BankGothic font.  So that begs the question, why do documents print correctly on Win7 machines with that option checked by default, but they do not print correctly on Win10 machines unless I uncheck that preference?

Does changing that preference affect how the document fonts will display on other people's computers or mobile devices?  Right now I can open and view documents on any machine in the office, and any document printed from Win7 with BankGothic looks fine.  Likewise I can open any document from Win10 using BankGothic but with that option turned off, on any machine in the office including Win7 machines, and the document looks fine.  Is there any issue either way with having that Rely On System Fonts Only" option turned off?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Depending upon how fonts are installed, Distiller may not see all fonts installed on a Windows 10 system. There have been a number of bugs reported against Windows 10's font handling, some of which have been fixed by Microsoft, some not.

In any case, when you use the Rely on System Fonts only, Distiller ignores any fonts that are in the PostScript stream that it processes. This causes major problems with certain applications that temporarily install fonts that are not otherwise available to other processes running on the system, such as Acrobat Distiller. One application that does something like that are Microsoft Office applications with documents that have TrueType fonts actually embedded in the document itself (yes, that is an option, albeit not used that frequently).

The original reasoning behind the Rely on System Fonts only option, introduced many Acrobat releases ago, was to optimize the PDF creation from PostScript in the Distiller. Using that option may yield slightly more efficient PDF, but not generally measurable in any significant way.

Our recommendation at Adobe is to uncheck that Rely on System Fonts only option within the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance, regardless of the Windows version you are running! It won't hurt anything or affect the ability of recipients of the resultant PDF files to open, view, and/or print such files.

          - Dov

[PKS-GSR94]

Awesome, thanks so much for the detailed reply.  I will make that change office-wide ASAP.

So now the question is, why doesn't Acrobat install by default with that option disabled?

[Dov Isaacs]

Might happen …

          - Dov