Fonts Corrupted in Supplied PDFs when Opening in Illustrator

[Matt2800051137pb]

A client sent over a file to us and wanted to prepress, impose, and edit the PDF they supplied. They usually supply files that play nicely with Illustrator, but today I opened up one of these files and found out that there were hidden/corrupted/faulty fonts and that they caused multiple errors to trigger on our imposition software. On the left is the file as opened in Adobe Acrobat and on the right as opened in Illustrator. It looks like there's some garbage under the hood here:

When I run a preflight check in Adobe Acrobat, I do find Type-0 fonts and it mentions Calibri in that report, which is what the exclamation points render out to upon opening in Illustrator. The address line on the bottom is Palatino Linotype-Roman, a TrueType font. Is anyone else familiar with this issue?

[Bobby Henderson]

What application was used to create the PDF? That can be seen in Properties within Acrobat. Both Calibri and Palatino Linotype are system fonts for Windows and are either TrueType or OTF with TrueType outlines. Some graphics applications that create PDF files may have default settings which convert TrueType fonts into Postscript Type 1 format. I've seen that in CorelDRAW for example. Adobe ended Postscript Type 1 font support in a recent update of Illustrator. The client will need to check their application's PDF export settings to make sure the fonts they're embedding aren't being converted to an incompatible format.

[Matt2800051137pb]

The PDF Producer is "macOS Version 11.6.4 (Build 20G417) Quartz PDFContext", PDF Version 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x), and exported from the Microsoft Word application. It also looks like it's embedding and encoding both fonts as TrueType fonts. This looks to be pretty typical on our end, and I doubt the client is exporting with anything but the default settings set for the "Save as PDF" export option from Word. Maybe this is an issue going from Apple to Windows...?

[Bobby Henderson]

It's possible a platform jump could cause the glitch. The versions of Calibri and Palatino Linotype included in the Mac version of MS Office could be different from the ones bundled into the Windows OS. But when the file is opened in Illustrator on a Windows PC the application may attempt to use the versions of those fonts installed in Windows. Something may be getting lost in the translation. If I didn't have to make any changes to text I would probably just to the Flatten Transparency trick to outline the embedded fonts on a copy of the PDF to solve the text issues.

While most TrueType fonts work okay hopping platforms, some don't work well at all. That's certainly true of certain system fonts in OSX. Of course Type 1 fonts are platform specific.