Help with PDF, I have a question.

[Niwa]

I just got back from vacation, and apparently there was an issue while I was out in regards to our forms. Someone printed a form with the wrong font and all hell broke loose. I was told that a PDF can loose its fonts on different computers, but I thought the idea of a PDF was that the file stayed the same, regardless of where it was opened.

I later found out the form that was printed from a Word document, which makes sense why the font got screwed up, but regardless my co-worker kept telling me that PDFs have the same issue. I have tried to find an issue of this happening to other people and I can't, so I was hoping someone here had an answer for me.

[Michael777]

PDF, assuming you are using some version of Acrobat to print from, can have funky issues with fonts/clip art/inserted photos etc.  Most often this is caused by the printer and how it reads the PDF, meaning you could print the same PDF on two different models of printers and see issues between the two hard copies.

 

You can correct most of these issues by checking off the 'Print as image' option under the advanced tab from the print window.  It should be there in most version of Acrobat.  However a few things to know about print as image; this option is per printer, not per file so if turned on it will stay on for all files sent to that printer until it is turned off, and you print one page to that printer to save the setting as off.  It will also increase the file size by a large amount so depending on the original size, and the speed of the printer you could hit an issue. 

[fengor]

Actually with PDF you have 3 options:

 

a) not embedding the font

embed a subset of the font

c) embed the whole font

 

With option a) obviously a pdf suffers from the same issues as a word document or a web page. if a font isnt available on the dislaying device it will fall back to a different font.

 

Option embeds only the used characters of a font in the pdf. This is useful if you for example only need a  handful of characters from a font. for example using a wingdings character for buletted lists. Since only the used characters are embedded it obviously saves space normally (there are some special circumstances where it actually uses more space than full embedding)

 

Option c) is what most people think of when they think about pdfs. Embedding the used fonts in the file so that it displays the same on all devices. 

 

Which of the options is used depends on the person who created the pdf