Certain graphics won't print when printing from InDesign

[JaggedLittleBill]

I am printing a customer supplied PDF from InDesign. (Attached) We needed to add bleeds and that's why I am not printing directly from Acrobat. The word STOLE on page 2 of the PDF won't print when printing from InDesign. (It will print when printing direct from Acrobat) I tried to find issues in Print Production and Preflight in Acrobat but admittedly, I'm not particulary savy as deciphering all of Acrobat's features. 

I'm on a PC, Windows 11 Pro, InDesign 20.3.1

[Joel Cherney]

This is not the first posting we've seen, around here, regarding problems with objects in Canva-produced PDFs. Even if you were savvy with advanced print production tools in Acrobat, I'd advise you that your most efficient path forward, time-wise, will most likely be rebuilding that document from the ground up in another application. 

Edit: it's possible that someone who actually is working with customer-supplied Canva files might have some more useful suggestions, so please do understand my comment as being made not by someone who regularly massages clients' Canva PDFs into a print workflow, but by someone who got burned, this one time. 

[JaggedLittleBill]

Thank you for your reply.  We get quite a few Canva files from customers (often with issues) but this particualar issue was not the garden variety (not for us, anyway). Unfortunately, in this case, we printed the file without noticing the lost graphic and the customer is asking what they did on their end to cause this to happen and how they can avoid it in the future. I was hoping to provide them with a technical answer as to what happened but I can't nail down the issue on my end. 

[Joel Cherney]

Well, I think we'd have to wait for my hypothetical forums regular who regularly works with Canva-produced PDFs in some way besides immediately ripping them into their component pieces and recreating them in InDesign, to get the answer you're looking for. (Canva doesn't support many of the languages I work in.)

But the PDF spec allows for documents to be built in any number of ways, and it's not something that we as end users of the tools can typically control. But here I am, using the Edit PDF tool trying to delete the word "CREATOR":

I wouldn't know how to rebuild the document to prevent this from happening, but I'm pretty sure that this is the problem. If you select that text and paste it elsewhere, you'll see that according to Acrobat that text says 

CUSTOM CRSTOEATOLER

and the words "stole creator" if you removed their extensive tracking & baseline adjustment, would look like this:

  STO    LE
CR   EATO  R 

I suppose that they could flatten PDFs that were going to print? But the real answer, in my book, is "don't let Canva PDFs go to print." 

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

When I removed the weird tracking, the word "Stole" printed. I would outline the fonts and be done with it.

[JaggedLittleBill]

I'm starting to think it would be good practice to convert all fonts to outlines in every PDF we get, lol. I'm not familiar with Canva so I don't know if that's something we can have this particular customer do on their end.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

One does lose something typographicly when converting to outlines, but, in truth, would one be using Canva if one cared about such things? 😜😜

[Peter Spier]

I've never tried to print a Canva PDF, so my advice is pretty limited, but I ran a preflight check in Acrobat, which threw up a font error for the word STOLE. Seems it's an incorrectly coded T3 Font, and Acrobat seems unable to repair it.

I think I found a way to get around this, though. If you move to the second page and open the Flattener Preview you can check the box to Convert all Text to Outlines. Do NOT Click OK, but instead on the right hand side of the dialog click Apply to Current Page and then hit the apply button (work on a copy -- this cannot be undone). Thes instructions are from Acrobat Pro 10, so you may have to interpret a bit for newer versions.

[JaggedLittleBill]

Thanks for your reply. I've used that workaround many times before in Acrobat (converiting to outlines). Are you able to tell me where in preflight you got that font error?

[Peter Spier]

It popped up when trying to do a PDF/X compliance check and conversion

[JaggedLittleBill · Accepted solution]

As a workaround fix, I found that opening their (Canva) PDF in Illustrator and then saving it as an .ai file and then placing it into InDesign let me print it without any font issues.