Acrobat Distiller fonts overview

Learn more about font handling in Acrobat Distiller to create high-quality PDFs with text searchability, appearance, and editability.

The fonts used in your PostScript file determine the output when you convert the file to a PDF document using Adobe Acrobat Distiller. Understanding how Acrobat Distiller handles fonts can help you improve your PDF output quality and ensure text remains searchable, editable, and printable.

Font types

Acrobat Distiller recognizes the following font types based on the operating systems:

• Type 1 (PostScript) fonts
• Type 3 fonts
• Bitmap and vector fonts (Windows only)
• TrueType fonts
• OpenType fonts from Adobe
• TrueType dFonts (macOS only)

Character sets for Type 1 fonts

Type 1 fonts support various character sets for different languages and document types:

• ISO Latin 1: Standard English, French, Italian, and German alphabets, punctuation, and numbers
• Expert: Fraction and ligature characters for the English alphabet
• SC & OSF: Specially designed letters and numbers for document customization
• Symbol: Non-text special characters and symbols
• Cyrillic: Characters for languages like Russian and Ukrainian
• Kanji: Double-byte Japanese characters

Font processing 

When converting a document to PDF, Acrobat Distiller references each font in the original document through several processes:

• Font Identification: Distiller identifies fonts by looking for PostScript names in the font's name table. When unavailable, it uses the system name. For Type 42 fonts lacking name tables, Distiller creates one from matching system fonts.
• Font Description: Distiller adds descriptions to the PDF for Type 1 fonts using ISO Latin 1 character sets. When viewing PDFs, Acrobat uses installed matching fonts or creates substitutes based on these descriptions.
• Font Embedding: With font embedding enabled, Distiller embeds:
  • TrueType fonts with appropriate permissions
  • Type 3 fonts
  • Type 1 fonts not using ISO Latin 1
  • OpenType fonts in Distiller 7.0 with PDF 1.6 compatibility

Embedded fonts ensure consistent viewing and printing across systems, even when the font isn't installed. However, text editing requires the font to be installed on the editing system.

• Font Permissions and Conversions: Distiller follows the font embedding permissions. Fonts with restricted permissions cannot be embedded and will generate errors. When Distiller cannot interpret font information, it substitutes fonts or converts them to bitmap images, which affects searchability and editability.

Font descriptors

For each embedded font, Distiller includes descriptors that define characteristics like:

• Ascent, Descent, and CapHeight: Vertical measurements of character dimensions
• FontBBox: Smallest rectangle containing all characters
• ItalicAngle: Angle of dominant vertical strokes
• StemV and StemH: Width of vertical and horizontal character stems
• Flags: Font attributes like serif, fixed-width, and italic.
• Optional information: Metrics like FontFamily, FontWeight, and Leading.

Best practices for font handling

Try the following best practices to ensure optimal font quality and PDF usability: 

• Use Type 1 fonts when possible for optimal conversion quality.
• Verify TrueType fonts have proper installation and editing permissions.
• Configure appropriate font embedding settings in Adobe PDF Settings.
• Install the necessary language support packages for non-Latin scripts.
• Understand how printer driver settings affect font handling.
• Test critical documents to ensure proper font rendering and functionality.
• Avoid Multiple Master fonts when editing PDF text is required.

PostScript printer driver settings for TrueType fonts

When TrueType fonts are processed through Adobe PostScript printer drivers, they're typically encoded as Type 42 or CID fonts with font-specific indices. This creates font subsets in the PostScript file, reducing file size but affecting font handling.