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J
JKennedyMD
Participant
April 12, 2019
Question

Invalid font

  • April 12, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 6159 views

This is from my attempt to print a PowerPoint handout

%%[Page: 384]%%
%%[Page: 385]%%
SourceSansPro-Regular not found, using Courier.
%%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: xshow ]%%

Stack:
[75 75 75 75 37 75 75 75 45 75 45 37 75 75 0]
(             
)


%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Any hints as to what to do?

    1 reply

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    April 12, 2019

    We assume that you are trying to create a PDF file by printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance, correct?

    The message indicates that a font referenced in your PowerPoint file is not installed on your system such that the Distiller (part of the print process) can find it.

    There are two available solutions for you to try.

    First, check the Properties settings for Adobe PDF. Go to the Advanced tab and click on Printing Defaults. Under the Adobe PDF Settings tab, look for the checkbox labelled Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts:

    Deselect that option (i.e., no check mark), press OK, then Apply and OK. Then try the print operation again.

    Second, don't print to create a PDF file, use the Acrobat PDFMaker feature that is part of Acrobat. Use Save as Adobe PDF which avoids the print process entirely.

    If neither of these yield the proper output, it is very likely that your problem is that the Source Sans Pro font isn't actually installed on your system and that internally, PowerPoint is doing a font substitution but is trying to use that font on output.

    Let us know what you find.

                   - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
      M
      MHP777123
      Inspiring
      July 1, 2020

      Thank you for this help! I only recently started having this problem, with SourceSansPro-Bold, with Outlook messages. I don't know if it started to happen because of an Outlook update or an Acrobat update, but I always keep up-to-date with both. When I first started having this error about a month ago, I went into Creative Cloud and downloaded the entire font family for Source Sans Pro (as part of my membership, under Active Fonts in the CC Desktop control panel). This didn't help. I then downloaded the Source Sans Pro fonts themselves (for Windows) and manually installed them, which finally allowed me to print my email message. Now today, the problem resurfaced, despite the entire Source Sans Pro family being Active in the CCD CP, and despite Windows having these fonts as system fonts. It took unchecking the option above to make it work. This should not have happened in the first place - it wasn't broke until about a month ago! Adobe should definitely UN-check the option above by default, or else find a solution that doesn't require doing so, seeing as these messages, for me, only came because of the Source Sans Pro font and no others.

      M
      MHP777123
      Inspiring
      July 1, 2020

      One more thing - Using the Acrobat PDFMaker in Outlook produces inferior results, compared to Printing through the PDF printer. The email message layout gets messed up, and the process doesn't include all the graphics in the email message, which the Print process retains. So using Acrobat PDFMaker as a solution to this problem is not a good solution.

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