font changes when creating pdf in indesign

[ka_d]

Hello,

I'll try to be as brief and accurate as possible.

I'm doing a poster. I'm using Alegreya.

When I use the medium font, the pdf file exported is fine.

When I use the regular font, the text that is in English is fine, but the text that is in Greek changes into dots while the numbers change into a different font altogeh

[BobLevine]

What version of InDesign? What operating system? What are your export settings? Can we see some screenshots from InDesign and Acrobat? Are you sure the glyphs exist in that font?

[ka_d]

These are two screenshots that show the differences. All texts are in Alegreya Regular.

[ka_d]

And this is what happens if I change the Greek text and the numbers only into Alegreya Medium. The English is still in Alegreya Regular.

It's InDesign 2022.

[BobLevine]

You need to open the PDF in Acrobat. You are looking at a preview in Windows Explorer.

[ka_d]

This is what I get when I try opening in Acrobat. 

I'm sorry it's only on half of the screen, but I think it's pretty clear it's the same.

However, the information given now might be relevant?

[leo.r]

And do you have the same issue with any other font?

[ka_d]

I don't think so. This is a screenshot with Brill. Funnily enough -or maybe not- the note about the incompatibility of Alegreya comes up again, although Alegreya is not used in this page.

[BobLevine]

Please get out of preview mode in InDesign and take another screenshot.

[ka_d]

Here is another screenshot, but none of the previous ones were in preview mode - unless there is something I'm missing.

[BobLevine]

They are all in preview mode! We need frame edges, hidden characters and any text highlighting for missing fonts/glyphs. With nothing selected, hit the w key to get out of preview mode.

[ka_d]

My fault: thought they were the other way round, apologies.

[BobLevine]

Can you highlight the text that is getting messed up in the export and show the character panel while it's highlighted?

[ka_d]

@BobLevine , like that?

[ka_d]

I don't know what VSLVLN is.

[leo.r]

I don't know what VSLVLN is.

By @ka_d

it's just an internal id, ignore it.

[Joel Cherney]

There is clearly some kind of embedding failure when subsetting the Regular face, that's not affecting the Medium face, right? Font embedding in PDF is meant to store only the glyphs you need to render your Greek text, not all the glyphs in the entire font.  One really normal cause of such embedding failures for me is InDesign finding more than one copy of the font (or an identically-named font) in some other font location that ID can access. This could be an Alegraya in TTF format in the Document Fonts folder where the INDD file is. Or it could be an Alegraya Regular in the Windows Fonts folder and all of the faces - Regular included - activated in Adobe Fonts. Or it could be a perfectly reasonable set of Alegraya, installed in the Windows Fonts folder, but the Regular face was downloaded from some kind of Arrr, Download Free Fonts Here, Matey site and has a different internal naming structure than the rest of the family, legitimately downloaded from the foundry.

Anyhow, those are some places to look. But another avenue for you to test would be to change the subsetting percentage at export:in the  "Advanced" section of the PDF Export Settings dialog, you can set "subset fonts when percentage of characters used is less than" and set it to 0%, which IIRC should force the entire font to embed.  

[ka_d]

Thank you, @Joel Cherney I found and deleted all Alegreya files and then reinstalled the font from Google Fonts. No difference, I'm afraid. I tried the 0% setting as well, but still no difference.

I'm starting to think I should give up on Alegreya and look for something else.

[Willi Adelberger]

What font type are the fonts?

[ka_d]

They are True Type, if that's what you mean. Do forgive me, I'm not really an expert in any of these.

[Willi Adelberger]

TrueType fonts can have a flag that does not allow embedding fonts in PDF, EPUB or EPS. This happens very often with free fonts from the web. They want to sell the font. So you might  purchase the font if it is a free font.

[BobLevine]

They're google fonts. They can be embedded.

They may have TTF extensions but they are OpenType.

[mk-will]

Hi, @ka_d ,

where did you get the fonts from?

Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts or what font vendor?

Assuming you are using Windows (10/11?) go to list of fonts, double-click the Alegreya Medium and Regular entries and tell us, what version are these two (second line under Headline- Version: ).

Regards

Stephan

[ka_d]

Hello, Stephan / @mk-will ,

I got the fotns from Google Fonts. Ant it is 2.009 for both. 

Katerina

[ka_d]

Also, I don't know how relevant this is, but when I highlight the numbers, for example, I get the message seen on the screenshot attached.

K.