Illustrator outlining fonts when opening a pdf

[danvh]

When I open a pdf file in Illustrator, sometimes a font is outline only in certain places.

I get a message "To preserve appearance, some text has been outlined." & the same font is outlined in some spots but left as text in others. Some times just one word would outline but the rest of the line would still be a font. Any body know why this happens & how to solve it?

Thanks

[Larry G. Schneider · Accepted solution]

The reason is that fonts are being subsetted to less than the complete font. The ligatures of the font are being outlined, especially ones like "ie". One way is to not allow subsetting of fonts when saving the file. It may increase the file size some but should solve the outlining problem.

[danvh]

Thank you for your reply.
I did think of this but it doesn't make any sense. Whether the font is subset or not, the characters used are embedded in the document so there should be no reason for the outlining. Also some of the same characters that are outlined in one area are left as a font in another. I've seen it happen to a whole line of type or to just one word. It seems to just randomly outline fonts. Unless this some kind of bug in Illustrator or it's something unique to my system. I'm wondering if anybody else has seen this issue.

[Larry G. Schneider]

Have you tried to check using Acrobat to see how many versions of subsetted fonts are in in the PDF?

[danvh]

I checked and there is only one version for each font.

This really isn't an issue, I'm just wondering why this would happen & if it's an Illustrator problem or something wrong with my system. That's why I'm interested if others are having the same issue.

Thank You.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

This is happening when there are ligatures as Larry already wrote.

You can easily test it with a copy of the paragraph that doesn't have ligatures.

If you think that this is buggy behaviour, then please post a bug report: http://illustrator.uservoice.com

[TECHNI]

This same thing has happened to me since the last update in December. It has to be a bug because, before the most recent updates, I have never come across my PDFs becoming outlines for the same reason you pointed out.

[Anubhav M]

Hello @TECHNI,

We understand that encountering technical issues can be frustrating. Would you mind sharing more details, like the exact version of the OS/Illustrator, link to a sample file after uploading to Dropbox/Google Drive/etc., and screenshots/screen recording of the problem (https://adobe.ly/49XsEd1), so we can investigate this further?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Anubhav

[Bobby Henderson]

It all depends on the PDF and the application that created the PDF. If you save an Adobe Illustrator layout in PDF format with Illustrator editing capability preserved when that file is re-opened in Illustrator it will be Illustrator data that is accessed rather than PDF data. Live text objects, including ones with ligatures, will be intact. Most other applications, be it rival vector graphics applications or office apps like MS Word, will create PDF files that are really only good for viewing or printing.

Technically the PDF format is really only meant for document viewing and printing; PDF files are not really meant to be used for further editing. There are all sorts of tricks PDF creators will use to reduce file sizes. Subsetting fonts (using only the mininum number of characters needed) is one of those tricks. These kinds of PDF files can turn into a real mess when opened in Illustrator. Sometimes we're stuck having to deal with that because we need to extract a logo or some other piece of artwork out of that PDF and the customer doesn't have any better art assets to provide.