It's been awhile since I was in design school and I was taught pretty militantly that if the fonts are not included with something, it better darn well have its text turned into outlines. This has stayed true through my current job - my boss has us outline fonts before making PDFs - especially if the PDFs are coming out of Illustrator or are going into QuarkXPress.

Every year we design a visitor guide - its basically a magazine. Every year I have to field all the ads that aren't to spec. Every year we get a batch of ads from high-end design firms who insist their ads are fine when Quark refuses to spit them out as anything other than postscript garbage.

The latest is a PDF that was done in InDesign (which we don't have here at work). None of the fonts were outlined or sent along with the ad. We don't have the font, so font substitution occurred. Of course, we requested they outline their fonts - which they did - all but a small line of text along the bottom that, again, we don't have the font for. (I check the ads in Illustrator CS3; if they are fine, I don't mess with them and simply place the ad into the Quark file).

When I asked again for *everything* to be outlined, the gal replied with "That type is different – it shouldn’t need to be outlined."

Am I missing something?

You should request that they *embed* all fonts when generating the PDF. In many cases, it's best to embed the entire font, and not a subset, just to be safe. That should make Quark happy.

However, I have run into instances where Quark will choke on otherwise correctly-generated PDFs, simply due to the fact that the PDF version is newer than what Quark can handle. You need to know what PDF version Quark can handle and ask suppliers to save down to that version.

Ahhhh. Yeah, this woman's fonts were definetely not embedded.
Are there situations where embedding is more trouble than it is worth other than version issues you mentioned?

No.
Embedding fonts is standard practice when preparing PDFs, for professional printing or simply sharing with others. Font embedding is one of the features of the PDF spec that makes it so highly portable.

There really isn't any work to embedding a font beyond toggling a button in the Save dialog. It can be a bit more involved if you are using Acrobat Distiller to produce PDFs, but it doesn't have to be.

The only real issue one might encounter when embedding a font is when the font in question is tagged to not allow embedding. Fonts such as these tend to be very old fonts from the 90's. They are rare animals, these days.

Thanks so much for the info, Thorzdad! I am still a youngster in the print world and I fear my education was somewhat lax in the PDF department. When I was in college, all my professors insisted on EPSs for placing stuff into QuarkXPress (no one used InDesign yet). At my current job, we still use Quark and though most of the ads we are placing in this layout are PDFs we still get ads like the one I mentioned above that don't seem to have their fonts included. I am not educated enough to know how to proceed and my boss has been doing things his own way for so long that I fear he has ended up the same. Anyway, the ads were made in InDesign 3 and from what I can tell, InDesign is really great with PDF-making but maybe this designer is forgetting a step?

Nothing is rare in Alaska! We have an odd mix of people always wanting and getting the best and newest in technology but hanging on to all the old stuff at the same time! You should see my boss's Zip disk collection that he refuses to chuck even though we don't even have a drive for it anymore.

Glad to help.
If the PDFs are coming from InDesign, I'm very surprised the fonts aren't embedded already. I'm pretty sure that's the default.

I still have my old Zip disks too. Though, anything worth saving was transferred to DVD a long time ago.

Hey, Howls!
One of the cool things about Adobe's PDF stuff is that you can create customized "presets" for generating PDFs. This is basically a "recipe" that ensures the resulting PDF meets the specs you need, and these presets are actual file plug-ins that can be sent to clients to install on their computers. Once installed, they can generate a PDF using that recipe and the resulting PDF file will conform to what you need. We use a few specific printers for all of the stuff we create at my office, and most sent us their PDF presets to install (the others just told us to use a certain built-in preset). For us, and the advertisers that send us tons of ads, that's eliminated 90% of the headache of missing fonts, RGB instead of CMYK, etc.

Here's an (ugly) link to some info that might help you if you wanted to create your own:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/9.0 ... f10.w.html

Two years ago, I moved the magazine I publish from Quark to InDesign for many reasons, but one of them was definitely the integration of page layout with PDFs, the way the print industry has moved. For what it's worth, ID definitely makes handling/generating PDFs much easier, as Thorz indicates, and even though it's not easy and an investment, I don't hesitate to suggest switching from Q if it's a possibility at your office. I've never been an Adobe fan at all, but their CS bundles are great for commercial designers and publishers.