If you’re exporting documents from InDesign CS4 to PDF there’s an issue that has recently come to light in the User to User forum that you should be aware of.
If you’ve placed PDFs created by Quark 7 or earlier or distilled using Distiller 8 or earlier, some characters in those PDFs may be dropped when viewing or Printing the PDF from Acrobat or Reader version 8 and earlier. Adobe has recently acknowledged this problem and issued a technote on it.
The reason for the problem is:
The fonts in the original PDF are embedded as symbolic fonts. Acrobat and PDF Library 8.x and earlier are not capable of correctly rendering symbolic fonts if the font encoding doesn’t contain the glyph names for every glyph in the font.
The workarounds as outlined include using the PDF/X-4 standard when exporting or exporting the PDF to postcript from Acrobat distilling it.
The most disturbing aspect of this is that almost all users of CS4 are likely to have Acrobat 9 Professional installed and when viewing or preflighting their PDFs there everything appears fine.
Until this is actually fixed it may be wise to install an earlier version of Reader or Acrobat in order to look at any exported PDFs.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on May 29, 2009
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