Designers Guide to Mac OS X Tiger

A PDF document is like a shell that holds all of the parts you need to properly display a document. The shell contains the document text, graphics, and fonts necessary to output your file to most any printer, direct-to-plate or film system, or display. Figuring out what's in your document's PDF shell is pretty straightforward until you get to the fonts. If the fonts you used in your document aren't embedded in the PDF along with the graphics and text, your document won't look the way you expect.

If you make your PDF using Mac OS X's built-in Save as PDF option in the Print dialog, every font used in your document should be embedded. If you use Adobe Acrobat, fonts are included based on your PDF settings in Adobe Distiller. (See the sidebar "The Many Parts of Acrobat" for more information on Acrobat and Distiller.)

Tip

Even though Tiger's built-in PDF option in the Print dialog makes PDF documents that you can open in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, it's not a professional-level tool. For full control over how your PDF is made, Acrobat Professional is the only way to go.

Here's how to check which fonts are included:

1.

Launch Distiller by choosing Applications > Adobe Acrobat Professional > Distiller.

2.

Choose Settings > Edit Adobe PDF Settings.

3.

In the Adobe PDF Settings: Standard dialog, click the Fonts tab (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. Be sure to check Embed All Fonts in Distiller's font settings. Otherwise, your PDF won't include the fonts it needs to display properly on other computers.

If the "Embed all fonts" box is checked, all of the fonts used in documents you convert to PDF will be included in the file. If you also check the "Subset embedded fonts when percent of characters used is less than" box, Distiller will embed only the actual characters that are used in the document. Doing so helps to keep the file size of your PDF from becoming too large, especially if you use OpenType fonts, which can contain upwards of 64,000 characters in a typeface. Subsetting can dramatically reduce the final size of your PDF document.

The Many Parts of Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat has several functions: creating, modifying, and viewing PDF documents. The Acrobat family includes a few different applications to make all of that happen:

  • Acrobat. Adobe Acrobat lets you view PDF documents, modify them, and add or remove password security. As a designer, you should have Adobe Acrobat Professional installed on your Mac.

  • Distiller. Adobe Distiller is the application that works behind the scenes to generate PDF documents for you. You use Distiller to create the settings that determine which fonts are included in your documents, the level of compression that is applied to graphics, and which versions of Adobe Reader can open your PDF documents.

  • Adobe Reader. Adobe Reader is a free reader application that is used to view PDF documents. It can't create or modify PDF documents. Adobe Reader is available for a wide range of operating systems, including Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, several versions of Windows, Unix, Linux, and more.

Some font foundries include special licensing information in their typefaces that prevents the typefaces from embedding in a PDF. Distiller honors font licensing and will alert you if it can't embed a font. If the font licensing prevents a font from embedding, and you are sending your PDF to a print shop or service bureau for final output, you'll have to check with the font foundry to see if it's OK to include the fonts when you deliver your files for output.

If the license prohibits you from including nonembedded fonts with your project, you can go back to your original document and convert all fonts to outlines, but that can make your text look a little fatter. If you want to learn more about fonts, check out Chapter 2, "Fonts."

Tip

Mac OS X's Save as PDF option will not alert you if a font fails to embed.

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