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davidg81127530
davidg81127530
New Participant
May 1, 2018
Question

Fonts not embedding in PDF but no warning

  • May 1, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 1983 views

Hi, i recently sent a PDF exported from inDesignCC 2018 to be printed and was contacted by them telling me that the text wasn't displaying correctly because the font hadn't been embedded. I wasn't given a warning from the software so I am now slightly unnerved about whether or not my fonts are being embedded or not. How am I supposed to know?

Thanks.

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3 replies

jerryb27224586
jerryb27224586
New Participant
January 29, 2019

I know I'm late to the party, but NOT all fonts embed. Not sure what these guys are talking about. I've been a designer for decades and know these adobe programs like the back of my hand. Every once in a while you'll run into a font (such as a free font) that has a personal usage license which does not permit embedding. You would have to actually purchase the commercial version of that font for embedding purposes. Yeh, it'll look fine on your screen, but try sending it to someone that doesn't have the font installed or to the printer and it won't work.

Steve Werner
Steve Werner
Community Expert
January 29, 2019

You are correct. There are some old, or free fonts that do not permit embedding. You should replace those with fonts that can be embedded. And you will get an alert if a font won't allow embedding when you try to export it as PDF, or print it.

BobLevine
BobLevine
Community Expert
May 1, 2018

The only time I've seen that is with luddite printers that opened the PDF in Illustrator. Please get us full details on what they're doing and how you created the PDF.

    Steve Werner
    Steve Werner
    Community Expert
    May 1, 2018

    I don't know the "them" who you're referring to but they are wrong: InDesign ALWAYS EMBED FONTS in its PDF files. What it doesn't do is it doesn't embed all the characters, only those which are used. It embeds a subset which you can view if you open up the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and view File > Properties > Fonts as shown below:

    But the PDF should be reproducable for printing processes which accept either PostScript or PDF for printing.

    davidg81127530
    davidg81127530Author
    New Participant
    May 1, 2018

    Thanks for that. I've just opened up the PDF in Acrobat in order to check out the document properties as you suggested and i got an error message saying that it "cannot extract the embedded font...". Could this mean that the font is corrupted? Strange thing is, it opens up fine in Apple Preview (my default image viewer) which is why I was unaware of the problem. No one else had experienced any problems with the PDF's either....

    Steve Werner
    Steve Werner
    Community Expert
    May 1, 2018

    Try a different font, or find a backup of the font you're using (which might not be corrupted).

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