A confusing Type 1 Font alert in Preflight Profile. Any explanations?

[B-Ehrlich]

First, I understand Adobe will no longer be supporting Type 1 fonts as of January 2023.

I use an Adobe Preflight setting that flags Type 1 fonts with a warning message, “Text uses Type 1 font”

I have a whole library of documents that use Frutiger OpenType. I’ve triple checked these InDesign files to be sure there are no Type 1 fonts. After exporting the InDesign files to PDFX, then running Preflight in Adobe Acrobat ProDC, the preflight shows a warning that the Frutiger font is Type 1. It's not. I checked each font name to be sure InDesign didn’t somehow replace the OpenType version with a Type 1 version and, no, the name correctly matches the OpenType font name.

Two questions

Why does Adobe preflight think the Frutiger OpenType font is Type 1?

Any idea what will happen if Adobe Preflight is still interpreting the OT font as a Type 1 font after January 2023?

[Test Screen Name]

I'm pretty sure that Acrobat thinks it is type 1 because it _is_ type 1. It is normal and common for OpenType fonts to be converted to type 1 fonts when exporting. Have you looked at Acrobat's Properties - Fonts for the file to see what file type is used in the PDF? (It is not simply that your font file is lifted and dumped in a PDF; all sorts of things can happen).

It seems to be that the preflight you are running is needless, since type 1 support in PDF is not going away, nor could it (if Adobe are to follow the rules of PDF, that they invented but no longer control).

[B-Ehrlich]

Yes, the PDFX file Properties show that the OpenType Frutiger font is listed as Type 1. If this is not going to be a problem when Type 1 fonts are no longer supported, then I guess I just won't worry about it. But that's why I'm investigating this now. I want to know what will happen, whether this will become an issue, and if so, how to address it.

[Test Screen Name]

Basically PDF has to keep supporting type 1 because there are hundreds of millions of PDF out there using type 1 fonts, and they are supposed to stay readable forever. So anyone making a PDF reader is going to need to handle type 1 fonts, even decades after type 1 fonts (as actual font files) stopped existing.

This isn't so unusual for PDF. PDF allows other kinds of font you cannot get as font files.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse · Accepted solution]

I think the way to think about it is it's not the Type 1 outline format going away but rather the clunky and outdated Type1 multi-part font files for long dead Systems that's going away. It's just been a pain to keep supporting it when it's not a logical way of delivering them anymore. OTF CFF fonts are essentially just compressed versions of Type 1 outlines, so it's logical that they would be listed as such in a PDF where they are embedded... because until a time that all Postscript printers can handle PDF and CFF natively, they HAVE to be converted to Type 1 outlines for any Postscript printer to render them.