I’ve spent a long time getting custom glyphs in a font embed into a PDF file.
This works.
I have reported in another post that amending the PDF in any way loses the symbols if Preview is used. I have no solution to that other than ‘do not use Preview’
But I’ve run into a major show stopping issue : if the resulting PDF is printed, the glyphs do not print!
They are visible in Preview and on screen, yet nothing hits the paper.
Is there a way to save or amend a PDF in a manner that it will try to ‘print as image’ instead of … whatever it is doing…?
What happens if you print using Acrobat Reader instead ?
If that works then it sounds like yet another bug in Preview
I stopped using Preview for anything serious a few years back as it handles most things but not everything and does some things REALLY badly
This could be just one more
History:
I used to create a PDF with a bunch of icons as pictures.
That works.
However, people who open the PDF could not select these images and highlght them as text.
I commissioned a new TTF font, and if I use the symbols and embed the font, they display on screen and can be highlighted.
But if that is done in Preview, it discards the embedded font and all the symbols are lost.
So:
Yes I could convert to JPG but then the PDF is no better than one generated from ‘simple’ printing: its a just a big image … can’t be edited or selected.
I have found that I can make everything print in Adobe Acrobat , but I need to select the ‘print as image’ option… almost certainly thats doing the same thing.
I cannot advise people to do that. The app generates the PDF files ,and the PDF files are then sent to customer’s customers.
Thats too many people to send a ‘workaround’ to.
Tried using the DynaPDFGlyphOutlineMBS to convert the symbols to glyphs.
Again, it displays, but then Adobe complains that the PDF has an error when I try to print.
There are several levels of permissions for fonts. Some fonts cannot be embedded, just used on screen. Could be what is happening. Typically, fonts created with Fontographer are like that.
I have some font editors. One shows the font as embeddable and printable (but its a read only screen)
The Font validates in OSX.
It’s a mystery but I have decided to let it go for a while. Life is too short to make it shorter by anguishing over this.
This is a feature I haven’t had for the last 15 years, so the world won’t end if I don’t have it today.
In Fontlab, it is possible to restrict more finely how fonts behave.
But here I believe what happened is that the font has been embedded alright, but maybe not as vector, which means you have to have the font also installed on the machine to print.
Try installing the font as see what happens. If it prints fine, then you have to vectorize the font at embedding time for it to print without the font installed.
That does work. Which is infuriating as I thought the point about embedding the font is that it should NOT be required at the recipient’s end.
I guess you know what I am going to ask next?
Is that a thing?
Im using DynaPDFMBS. When inserting these symbols, I pass true as a parameter when setting the font.
That tells the PDF to embed the font.
As far as I can tell, rasterisation occurs at the other end (‘print as image’).
If I do it at this end, I get a PDF full of bitmaps, dont I?
[quote=360525:@Jeff Tullin]That does work. Which is infuriating as I thought the point about embedding the font is that it should NOT be required at the recipient’s end.
I guess you know what I am going to ask next?
Is that a thing?
Im using DynaPDFMBS. When inserting these symbols, I pass true as a parameter when setting the font.
That tells the PDF to embed the font.
As far as I can tell, rasterisation occurs at the other end (‘print as image’).
If I do it at this end, I get a PDF full of bitmaps, dont I?[/quote]
What Michel was referring to was instead of embedding the font you actually draw the individual glyphs as vector paths. This would give you vector (scaleable) quality output but with no ability to select / edit the text. Our application sometimes does this for certain fonts so it is achievable. DynaPDF has features to retrieve glyph outlines from fonts and has an example in the manual although I have not tried using DynaPDF to retrieve glyph outlines (we do it another way).
Font Embedding definitely works with DynaPDF as our software generates thousands of PDFs each day with fonts embedded. You may have found an edge case where DynaPDF isn’t working correctly or there is an issue with the font.
What happens is :
a/ The vector shapes are not selectable. Thats a downer.
b/ They are high quality. Thats good.
c/ Its very much slower to create the PDF (thousands of glyphs)
d/ Something in the result causes Adobe to say the PDF has an error. This is a PDF that has no embedded font, and only the vectors generated by the extraction.
Jeff, do you want to send me a link to the font in a PM? I have a few font programs here, I might be able to export it for printing and/or run some tests at this end? I understand if not.
No. The glyphs will use the font vectors and that will be resolution independent, like the font itself. The difference being it will print on anything.
