[Janger]

As I do not have Acrobat 5 and work in a OS X only environment, I sometimes save documents as PDF in my text editor. Doing so, I get the low res preview of EPS files within the PDF. I recently found out that opening these files in Illustrator, I could copy&paste the desired EPS directly and save the PDF again. Looked great at first sight and I was happy to have a workaround until the release of Acrobat 6.

But then I noticed that some characters had changed after saving the original PDF in Illustrator. This affected all special characters e.g. of Adobe's own Type 1 Symbol font, Linotpye's Stone Serif IPA and others. Illustrator 10 seems to have problems dealing with the extended character set of several fonts. Testing the method with only basic characters did not show any problems. Looks like very poor Unicode support to me.

Has anyone had similar experiences and has anyone talked to Adobe about it?

TiBook 550/512MB, OS 10.2.1, Illustrator 10.0.3

[art_director]

hey janger:

yes, i have recently had that problem. i tried everything i could think of to fix the issue. literally spent hours on it. then, by accident, i discovered something very odd. i have two copies of acrobat on my ti powerbook: one is the free reader, the second is the full version of acrobat 5. when i opened the offending file with the free reader i got font substitution similar to what you describe. when i opened it with the full acrobat version of reader the substitution did not occur. i e-mailed the pdf files to friends on macs and on pcs but none could replicate the issue i was having. i can't explain...

please try this and let us know what you learn. also, you could go to the trouble of converting your type to paths before creating the pdf. that would eliminate the font substitution issue.

cheers.

[Janger]

ok, I checked what you described, but get the same results.

1. save as PDF in Word
2. open in Illustrator -> characters garbled
3. save in Illustrator
4. open in Acrobat Reader 5.1 -> characters garbled
4. mail to a PC with Acrobat 5 installed
5. open in Acrobat 5 -> characters garbled

So, my issue seems to be more persistent than yours. Unfortunately, I cannot convert type to paths in Word, and when opening the files in Illustrator, the characters are already garbled.

Thanks anyway!

[art_director]

Sorry, I misunderstood your problem / issue. You could always copy and paste the type into Illustrator, convert that to paths and create a pdf from Illustrator. I understand it takes a little extra work, especially if the copy is long. But it's a work around. Good luck.

How is lovely Germany, by the way?

[bluedog]

Acrobat has a feature to use system fonts if they are not embedded and available in the actual PDF. It sounds like when you copy/paste the fonts don't get embedded.

The full Acrobat version you are using likely has this feature enabled. TURN IT OFF. It does NOTHING for allowing you to preview and make sure your PDFs have all the fonts embedded that you need.

And you are seeing its results by the disparity of the font display between reader and the full version.

Try other free versions of creating PDFs. When it comes right down to it PDF is a great format, but not all generators are created equal and Adobe has the market in that realm (the real thing).

This link may help.

www.versiontracker.com

For OSX, I've heard of people using PStill and Ghostscript(Ghostview) for creating PDFs. There are other options, but I don't know of any that embed the fonts in the same way Adobe does.

Good luck, and post a response when you have a solution.

[Janger]

Originally posted by bluedog:
Acrobat has a feature to use system fonts if they are not embedded and available in the actual PDF. It sounds like when you copy/paste the fonts don't get embedded.

The problem is not the copy/paste part. I just copy/paste some artwork, which is embedded as low res image by the "Print to PDF" function.

The full Acrobat version you are using likely has this feature enabled. TURN IT OFF. It does NOTHING for allowing you to preview and make sure your PDFs have all the fonts embedded that you need.
And you are seeing its results by the disparity of the font display between reader and the full version.

The fonts *are* embedded correctly and displayed correctly by Acrobat Reader and Acrobat full version. The characters are switched by saving the PDF in Illustrator 10, which has very poor font/PDF management. So I have great PDF files created by OS 10.2, which are crippled by Illustrator.

Try other free versions of creating PDFs. When it comes right down to it PDF is a great format, but not all generators are created equal and Adobe has the market in that realm (the real thing).

Mac OS 10.1 created very strange PDFs and could not deal with Type 1 fonts (Symbol or whatever). Mac OS 10.2 is improved here. I am just waiting for Acrobat 6 to create professional PDF files. The process I am going through now is just a little improvisation.

Good luck, and post a response when you have a solution.

I certainly will. Thanks!

- Janger