I cannot embed a font in my PDF. Why?

By On July 22, 2010 · 4 Comments

Optima fontQuestion: I create PDF documents on my Mac and I want to embed fonts but some of my fonts refuse to embed. Am I doing anything wrong?

Answer: Unless none of your fonts work with embedding and unless you have damaged files, there is no technical problem. This is something beyond your control.

Some fonts have built-in prevention that ensures they cannot be embedded. For instance, Optima is a font that you cannot put in a PDF and distribute publicly. Your publishing software cannot do anything about it and buying a different version of the font is not likely to work.

This is a decision that font designers take. Some will want to limit your right to spread their work around. Some will rather want to have the largest possible amount of visibility. Their bet is that people will want to buy a neat font after seeing it in your document.

Are there workarounds? Yes, but they have their limitations. For instance, you can save your work as an image and open that image to translate it as a PDF. But that is more likely to give a heavy PDF. Even the best compression will barely be able to reduce the size.

Using the Grab application to take a screenshot might be another idea. With this method, however, you are likely to lose some quality for viewing and printing.

The final tip is not fun to hear but it might be the most realistic. Use a different font, which grants embedding rights!

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  • Jake

    So, where can we find a list of which fonts *can* be embedded? Would be great info for planning PDF documents.

  • Steve

    > “instance, you can save your work as an image” In most cases that is the worse workaround (same as using Grab). You end up with a hugely bloated imagine that doesn’t scale, text is selectable, etc. You would be far better off converting the text to outlines (but make sure you save a version with the text in it’s original form for updating later).

    > “So, where can we find a list of which fonts *can* be embedded?” Jake, there is no such list. In 2002 Microsoft estimated there were 100,000 fonts at that time. Today there are easily over 250,000 fonts (and I wouldn’t be shocked if closer to a million) so no one is going to create such a list. A lot of these fonts are homegrown and amateurish but people still use them.

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  • http://www.christopherparsons.com Parsons Design

    Adobe OpenType version of Optima is easily embedded in PDF. Mostly only boutique type foundries prevent embedding. Screenshot and saving file as image is the same process (only potential difference lies in resolution).
    Any font which prevents embedded, you could convert to outlines in Adobe Illustrator and file size will not be significantly larger than embedding the font.
    Not certain if it has been changed but versions of Flash would allow you to embed fonts that PDF prevented.