Inspiring

Answered

Cannot extract the embedded font (Mac)

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
February 13, 2020
5 replies
3060 views

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.

Bug

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Room 237

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.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

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 237AuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

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.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

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

Dov Isaacs

Legend

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, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

Room 237Author

Inspiring

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.

Dov Isaacs

Legend

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.

… 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.

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

Dov Isaacs

Legend

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?

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)