1. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 1JACoWJACoW Problems Editing PDF text is often impossible because one needs the fonts which are in the PDF to be installed on the computer which one is using for the editing. Sometimes the Acrobat text touch-up will work but there are problems with PitStop. You cannot embed a complete font unless you have a license for it and even this may not help.

2. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 2JACoWJACoW Text Editing With LaTeX you can embed the full font in the PostScript file so one might expect that the fonts would be available for editing text… If the editor’s machine is not the machine which was used to make the PDF it will use the fonts installed on the editor’s machine and which are known to Acrobat  i.e. Type 1 Times-Roman embedded from LaTeX becomes TrueType TimesNewRomanPSMT when one opens it on a Windows machine.  Even on a UNIX box which made the PDF, Acrobat reader will use other fonts.

3. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 3JACoWJACoW Font Handling in Distiller If font embedding is enabled, Acrobat Distiller embeds TrueType and Type 3 fonts, and Type 1 fonts that don't use the ISO Latin 1 character set (such as symbol or expert characters)…  i.e. it will not embed our old Type 1 fonts like Times A font that is embedded in a PDF file is always available for viewing and printing, whether or not it's installed on the system. However, you cannot edit text in the PDF file unless the font is installed. If you try to edit text that uses an embedded font and the font isn't installed, Acrobat returns a warning and uses a substitute font instead. Quoting from Adobe technical support documents † † http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/325165.html and PitStop just refuses !!!

4. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 4JACoWJACoW More from techdocs TrueType fonts that have installation and editing permissions can be embedded in a PDF file by Acrobat Distiller. If the font doesn't include these permissions, Acrobat Distiller embeds a font subset (that is, only the characters of the font that are used in the document).  This is the killer – it over-rides all other parameters When you use Acrobat Distiller to create PDF files, text formatted with TrueType fonts may not be searchable, depending on how the font information was written into the PostScript file. In these cases, PostScript printers convert the TrueType font as a Type 42 font, which best preserves the font's characteristics, such as searchability.

5. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 5JACoWJACoW Font Licenses If you own the fonts on the machine which Acrobat is using to make the PDF, you should be able to embed the full set in the PDF file. However this may not help if one is working with a file which was produced from a PostScript file made by the author: his fonts may have different names and almost certainly he will be using MS fonts or LaTeX fonts which are not what the license will cover. I conclude that owning a license may only help if the editor starts from the original, uses the licensed fonts and all processing is done in the same environment and you only use TrueType fonts !

6. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 6JACoWJACoW Open Type Fonts OpenType fonts  Fonts that can be rendered from line and curve commands, and can be scaled and rotated. Open type fonts are clear and readable in all sizes and on all devices supported by windows. OpenType is an extension of TrueType technology. Type 1, by Adobe Systems, Inc.,  an outline font that is designed to work with PostScript printers. The outlines can be scaled and rotated. With OpenType technology, Windows fully supports Type 1 fonts. This is something to watch – it seems to be restricted to MicroSoft.

7. Fonts and Acrobat, Team Meeting, Frascati, 2005, J. Poole 7JACoWJACoW Conclusion on Fonts The good news is that Type3 fonts are no longer an issue  OCR means that the full text is indexed  Acrobat 6 and higher render them perfectly  In general file sizes are much bigger these days anyway so this overhead will be lost in the noise. Things will only get worse with OpenType coming in. Don’t bother with a license. Forget the sub-setting issue.