I created a document at home in Microsoft Publisher, which I then converted to a PDF and sent to my work email. Upon opening the PDF at work, I see that several of the fonts have been changed, and there is other nonsense going on (randomly bolded words, weird formatting changes).
I thought a PDF was more or less a ‘snapshot’ of the doc, and thus would be accurately represented on any other system that is able to view PDFs.
It seems as though the computer at work doesn’t have the font I used installed, but, as explained in the previous sentence, I wouldn’t think that would matter.
Any thoughts? Any easy way to fix/avoid this issue in the future?
Some PDF documents have their ascii text recognizable, some treat each page as a picture. It appears that the manner in which Publisher is allowing you to convert your pub document to a pdf document is retaining the ascii text as recognizable characters, as opposed to the latter method.
Try printing the document using CutePDF writer, a free print driver that puts the print output of any program into a pdf document that is nothing but a picture on each page.
Following up on Omar Little, if the text is kept as text rather than images, how it appears on a computer will depend on what fonts are installed on the computer. You might be able to fix this if you “embed fonts” when you create the document originally. However some fonts are not embeddable so it might not work, or this might not be the problem.
A PDF isn’t a “screenshot” so much as “a set of instructions needed to recreate the screen”. (In other words, it’s a vector format rather than a raster format.) So if your file had the word “dog” written in the Hoozlesnark Bold font, the instructions would be something like: “put a ‘d’ in Hoozlesnark Bold font at this location on the page; put an ‘o’ in Hoozlesnark Bold font to the right of that; put a ‘g’ in Hoozlesnark Bold font to the right of that.” The instructions in the PDF file, however, don’t necessarily tell your computer how to draw a ‘d’ in Hoozlesnark Bold. If the computer you’re loading the file on has the Hoozlesnark Bold font installed on it, then that computer will render the file properly. However, if it doesn’t, it’ll show a different default font instead, which will be close-ish to Hoozlesnark but will still look off-kilter.
The way to make sure that the second computer can render the file properly is to “embed fonts” in the PDF file when it’s created. This results in a larger file, since now the instructions in the file include instructions on how to draw each and every glyph in the Hoozlesnark Bold font. But now any other computer will be able use the instructions in the file to render the fonts properly. I don’t know precisely how to do this in Microsoft Publisher, but I would be very surprised if there wasn’t an option somewhere. These links look promising.
I do not think that is correct. I use CutePDF writer and, in the documents it creates, I can still search within the text, or copy parts of the text and paste into another document. I can’t do this with PDF’s created by scanning a document, however,* which does produce a PDF that is just an image.
On the other hand, I too suspect the problem is with Publisher, not MMM’s work computer, and it might be solved by using CutePDF rather than Publisher’s built in converter (or whatever MMM is using). It does seem odd, though, that MSPublisher would use a less sophisticated converter than a freeware program like CutePDF. Is it a very old version of Publisher?
*Well, not without further processing through an OCR program.
That ‘embedding fonts’ thing can be really annoying if you’re using Adobe Acrobat… because Acrobat’s default action during creating the PDF is to embed as little of fonts as it can.
Adobe refers to this as ‘subsetting’. There’s a setting in the PDF creation options that says something along the lines of, “Subset fonts when less than <XX>% is present”. The default is 100%. This will cause Acrobat to embed only the characters of each font that are actually called for by the text in the PDF.
To embed every character in every font, set this to 0%. You can always change this, but Acrobat will not remember your choice for the next time.
Since PDF experts are peeking in, have any of you had experience with the new version of Acrobat? We’ve been using Acrobat 9 Pro for several years and it gets the job done. We use it for basic review of layout proofs, sending files, etc. Not all that sophisticated.
The Adobe page has a longish video on the upgraded PDF to text functionality. It looks like it would be a great help here, but then again, it’s an ad. Anyone have experience with it yet? Is it as wiz-bang as the ad makes it seem?