Cannot extract the embedded font (Mac)

[Room 237]

Hello, I am desperate for a solution and would really appreaciate any help...

I have spent 8 hours trying everthing on these boards and the internet and nothing seems to work.

Out of nowhere, I am now getting this error "Cannot extract the embedded font" when opening PDFs I have created from InDesign files. This is happening on older and new InDesign files.

I'm on a Mac, my font manager is RightFont 5 and I have uninstalled and reinstalled the latest versions of Acrobat Pro DC and InDesign several times.

The fonts are all fine. I've made many PDFs with these fonts over the years. None are corrupt.

I have cleared the font cache several times and restarted.

I have even reinstalled fresh versions of the fonts which have worked countless times over the years.

I have a mix of OTF and TTF fonts, even the Mac System Arial will not embed.

Many thanks in advance.

[BobLevine]

Try it on a different computer or PDF reader. Doesn't sound like an InDesign issue.

[Room 237]

Thanks Bob,

I've tried opening the PDFs on other devices and get the same error. The fonts are just suddenly not embedding.

[Test Screen Name]

Please post your specific software versions, not "latest". 

[Room 237]

Hi, the versions are...

InDesign 15.0.1.209

Acrobat 19.021.200058

[Test Screen Name]

Thanks. For Acrobat that's the latest-but-one, the update will likely land soon.

Clearly the fonts ARE embedding or you wouldn't get the message. They are just embedding wrong!

Do you save the PDF direct to your hard disk, and open it direct from your hard disk?

[Room 237]

Hi,

Yeah, direct from InDesign to HD and opened on HD, iPhone and iPad to see if there was a difference.

All devices show the font either as a messed up substituted font or a long series of large dots.

[Dov Isaacs]

And what happens if you disable your RightFont 5 font manager? That would seem to be a variable here.

Also, what happens if you try this on another system?

[Room 237]

Hi Dov,

As a long time lurker, I knew I'd hear from you...

Yes, same issue with RightFont 5 disabled.

[Dov Isaacs]

Please post a sample of the PDF file that is causing the problems and we'll take a look at it here at Adobe. If you can't post it to the public, send me a private message and provide the link to the file there.

[Dov Isaacs]

Another thing to try is to package the InDesign document (that includes fonts gathered and placed in a subdirectory as part of the packaging process) and see if opening that InDesign file and exporting PDF makes any different. If that doesn't work, I would like to see a ZIP file of that package and see what we can do with that here at Adobe.

[Room 237]

EDITED as the reply button isnt working.

Thanks Dov,

It's strange fonts and files which have always exported to PDF perfectly fine suddenly not working...

Here is a test file: https://we.tl/t-MYjvo8hne6

I have also noticed, InDesign says all fonts in every job are incomplete and the package will not save fonts.

Many thanks.

[BobLevine]

Opens fine here.

[BobLevine]

Nevermind. I am getting that error. I opened quickly before and didn't even realize it opened in a browser.

[Dov Isaacs]

OK. Opened up the PDF file.

Neither the Arial-BoldMT nor the ShiningNFIDemo fonts are embedded in the PDF file. Acrobat attempts to use the AdobeSans MM (Multiple Master) font as the substitute for these fonts.

Running the List potential font problems analyzer in Acrobat Preflight yields two errors, the first being that “fonts revert to the .notdef glyph” and the second (which is the real problem) being that the substitution font doesn't have all the glyphs referred to by original fonts.

As such, the error message received is as expected since the lack of font embedding yields a mismatch between font encoding and the substitution font. There is no “after the fact fixup” in Acrobat that can resolve the problem.

Based upon your statement that InDesign clames that “all fonts in every job are incomplete and the package will not save fonts” is indicative of some major issue in your computer system's configuration, font subsystem, and/or some of the fonts themselves.

I don't think that there is anything more I can do to analyze this. Sorry!

[Test Screen Name]

I'm not sure I entirely agree that the font Arial-Bold MT isn't embedded. Certainly, Acrobat uses Adobe Sans MM to display it, but the PDF internals show a different story. The font Resource TT0 LOOKS embedded because

1. Its internal name is ZMJWZY+Arial-BoldMT, so it has an embedded subset prefix

2. Its Subtype is TrueType and its FontDescriptor dictionary contains a stream under the FontFile2 key.

HOWEVER, the stream appears to be empty (it has a Length of 8 bytes and decodes to 0 bytes).

I believe this causes Acrobat to consider the font as unusable and use the substitute font.

Since this file is exported from InDesign, it suggests that InDesign (or the PDF Library) will in some situations write a bad embedded font resource. This may be because of underlying font issues on the system, of course.

[Dov Isaacs]

… which means the font isn't really embedded. There are no glyphs there to do anything with. Due to some problem with either the font or InDesign or the MacOS font management system, the embedding was faulty.

[Test Screen Name]

Room_237, I'm looking at a file which has a similar sort of problem (font not properly embedded) but made with Acrobat rather than InDesign. I have a question for you. if you are free to answer - are you using macOS 10.15.4 Beta?

[Room 237 · Accepted solution]

Hello there,

For some reason I have not been able to reply to the forum until right now, been trying for days and the last 20 minutes, and suddenly it now works! I've not been able to post my solution because of this...

I am indeed using the Catalina Beta, and after trying everything known to mankind to fix the issue, I went into recovery mode, reinstalled the Beta and the issue was resolved... all fonts embdedding, all working perfectly.

So, maybe the last beta either had a bug, didn't update properly or the reinstall reset something I may have done.

[Test Screen Name]

Thank you for your reply.  Good to hear you fixed it - I'm now getting the problem myself (from Acrobat, not InDesign...)