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Last updated on
21 Dec 2023
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Also applies to Adobe Acrobat 2017, Adobe Acrobat 2020
- Acrobat User Guide
- Introduction to Acrobat
- Workspace
- Workspace basics
- Opening and viewing PDFs
- Working with online storage accounts
- Acrobat and macOS
- Acrobat notifications
- Grids, guides, and measurements in PDFs
- Asian, Cyrillic, and right-to-left text in PDFs
- Workspace basics
- Creating PDFs
- Editing PDFs
- Edit text in PDFs
- Edit images or objects in a PDF
- Rotate, move, delete, and renumber PDF pages
- Edit scanned PDFs
- Enhance document photos captured using a mobile camera
- Optimizing PDFs
- PDF properties and metadata
- Links and attachments in PDFs
- PDF layers
- Page thumbnails and bookmarks in PDFs
- PDFs converted to web pages
- Setting up PDFs for a presentation
- PDF articles
- Geospatial PDFs
- Applying actions and scripts to PDFs
- Change the default font for adding text
- Delete pages from a PDF
- Scan and OCR
- Forms
- PDF forms basics
- Create a form from scratch in Acrobat
- Create and distribute PDF forms
- Fill in PDF forms
- PDF form field properties
- Fill and sign PDF forms
- Setting action buttons in PDF forms
- Publishing interactive PDF web forms
- PDF form field basics
- PDF barcode form fields
- Collect and manage PDF form data
- About forms tracker
- PDF forms help
- Send PDF forms to recipients using email or an internal server
- Combining files
- Combine or merge files into single PDF
- Rotate, move, delete, and renumber PDF pages
- Add headers, footers, and Bates numbering to PDFs
- Crop PDF pages
- Add watermarks to PDFs
- Add backgrounds to PDFs
- Working with component files in a PDF Portfolio
- Publish and share PDF Portfolios
- Overview of PDF Portfolios
- Create and customize PDF Portfolios
- Sharing, reviews, and commenting
- Share and track PDFs online
- Mark up text with edits
- Preparing for a PDF review
- Starting a PDF review
- Hosting shared reviews on SharePoint or Office 365 sites
- Participating in a PDF review
- Add comments to PDFs
- Adding a stamp to a PDF
- Approval workflows
- Managing comments | view, reply, print
- Importing and exporting comments
- Tracking and managing PDF reviews
- Saving and exporting PDFs
- Security
- Enhanced security setting for PDFs
- Securing PDFs with passwords
- Manage Digital IDs
- Securing PDFs with certificates
- Opening secured PDFs
- Removing sensitive content from PDFs
- Setting up security policies for PDFs
- Choosing a security method for PDFs
- Security warnings when a PDF opens
- Securing PDFs with Adobe Experience Manager
- Protected View feature for PDFs
- Overview of security in Acrobat and PDFs
- JavaScripts in PDFs as a security risk
- Attachments as security risks
- Allow or block links in PDFs
- Electronic signatures
- Sign PDF documents
- Capture your signature on mobile and use it everywhere
- Send documents for e-signatures
- Create a web form
- Request e-signatures in bulk
- Collect online payments
- Brand your account
- About certificate signatures
- Certificate-based signatures
- Validating digital signatures
- Adobe Approved Trust List
- Manage trusted identities
- Printing
- Accessibility, tags, and reflow
- Searching and indexing
- Multimedia and 3D models
- Add audio, video, and interactive objects to PDFs
- Adding 3D models to PDFs (Acrobat Pro)
- Displaying 3D models in PDFs
- Interacting with 3D models
- Measuring 3D objects in PDFs
- Setting 3D views in PDFs
- Enable 3D content in PDF
- Adding multimedia to PDFs
- Commenting on 3D designs in PDFs
- Playing video, audio, and multimedia formats in PDFs
- Add comments to videos
- Print production tools (Acrobat Pro)
- Preflight (Acrobat Pro)
- PDF/X-, PDF/A-, and PDF/E-compliant files
- Preflight profiles
- Advanced preflight inspections
- Preflight reports
- Viewing preflight results, objects, and resources
- Output intents in PDFs
- Correcting problem areas with the Preflight tool
- Automating document analysis with droplets or preflight actions
- Analyzing documents with the Preflight tool
- Additional checks in the Preflight tool
- Preflight libraries
- Preflight variables
- Color management
Font embedding and substitution
A font can be embedded only if it contains a setting by the font vendor that permits it to be embedded. Embedding prevents font substitution when readers view or print the file, and ensures that readers see the text in its original font. Embedding increases file size only slightly, unless the document uses CID fonts. a font format commonly used for Asian languages. You can embed or substitute fonts in Acrobat or when you export an InDesign document to PDF.
You can embed the entire font, or just a subset of the characters used in the file. Subsetting ensures that your fonts and font metrics are used at print time by creating a custom font name. That way, for example, your version of Adobe Garamond®, not your service provider’s version, can always be used by the service provider for viewing and printing. Type 1 and TrueType fonts can be embedded if they are included in the PostScript file, or are available in one of the font locations that Distiller monitors and are not restricted from embedding.
When a font cannot be embedded because of the font vendor’s settings, and someone who opens or prints a PDF does not have access to the original font, a Multiple Master typeface is temporarily substituted: AdobeSerifMM for a missing serif font, and AdobeSansMM for a missing sans serif font.
The Multiple Master typeface can stretch or condense to fit, to ensure that line and page breaks in the original document are maintained. The substitution cannot always match the shape of the original characters, however, especially if the characters are unconventional ones, such as script typefaces.
Note:
For Asian text, Acrobat uses fonts from the installed Asian language kit or from similar fonts on the user’s system. Fonts from some languages or with unknown encodings cannot be substituted; in these cases, the text appears as bullets in the file.
Note:
If you have difficulty copying and pasting text from a PDF, first check if the problem font is embedded. Go to Document Properties from the hamburger menu (Windows) or the File menu (macOS). Then, select the Fonts tab in the Document Properties dialog box. For an embedded font, try changing the point where it's embedded rather than sending it inside the PostScript file. Distill the PDF without embedding that font. Then, open the PDF in Acrobat and embed the font using the Preflight fixup.
Accessing and embedding fonts using Distiller
When converting a PostScript file to PDF, Distiller needs access to the file’s fonts to insert the appropriate information in the PDF. Distiller first searches the PostScript file for Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType fonts. If the font isn’t embedded in the PostScript file, Distiller searches additional font folders. Distiller searches the following font folders in Windows:
/Resource/Font in the Acrobat folder
/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Fonts
Distiller searches the following font folders in Mac OS:
/Resource/Font in the Acrobat folder
/Users/[user name]/Library/Fonts
/Library/Fonts
/System/Library/Fonts
The Acrobat installation includes width-only versions of many common Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts, therefore Distiller can then access these fonts in Acrobat. Make sure that the fonts are available on your computer. (In Windows, choose Complete when you install Acrobat, or choose Custom and select the Asian Language Support option under the View Adobe PDF category. In Mac OS, these fonts are installed automatically.)
For information on including fonts in a PostScript file, see the documentation that came with the application and printer driver you use to create PostScript files.
Note:
Distiller does not support Type 32 fonts.
To specify other font folders for Distiller to search, in Acrobat Distiller, choose Settings > Font Locations. Then in the dialog box, click Add to add a font folder. Select Ignore TrueType Versions Of Standard PostScript Fonts to exclude TrueType fonts that have the same name as a font in the PostScript 3 font collection.
Note:
To provide Distiller with access to a font folder that has been moved, use this dialog box to remove the folder listed in its old location and add it in its new location.
Preview PDFs without local fonts
You can create a printable preview of your document that substitutes default fonts for any text formatted in fonts that are available on your local computer but are not embedded in the PDF. This preview can help you decide whether to embed those local fonts in the PDF, to achieve the look you want for your document.
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In the Preferences dialog box under Categories, select Page Display, and then deselect Use Local Fonts.Note:
If a font cannot be substituted, the text appears as bullets, and Acrobat displays an error message.
Find PostScript font names
If you need to enter a font name manually on the Fonts panel of the Adobe PDF Settings dialog box, you can use a PDF to find the exact spelling of the name.
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Use any application to create a one-page document with the font.
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Create a PDF from the document.
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Open the PDF in Acrobat, and select the hamburger menu (Windows) or File (macOS). Then select Document Properties > Fonts.
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Write down the name of the font, using the exact spelling, capitalization, and hyphenation of the name as it appears in the Font Info dialog box.