Text different in PDF export

**Charles Moir** · 27 March 2008, 09:21 PM

Works for me here. Mysterious. I suspect this may be font encoding problem. Can you please try this with v3.2 and let me know whether that works for you or not?

**amoore** · 27 March 2008, 09:33 PM

Both files look good ot me. WinXP SP2. Jaws PDF Editor v4.

**Colin Carpenter** · 27 March 2008, 09:34 PM

It's certainly curious, so I did another test.

I have a brochure that I created the other day, so I loaded it up in my registered version of Extreme Pro (V3.0 CD) and exported a page to a PDF. I then loaded the same file in the new trial version V4.0 and exported the same page to a PDF. Using PDFSAM I merged the two pages to create a 2 page PDF which I attach here. The first page is from V3.0CD and the 2nd is from V4.0 Trial.

I suspect that some folk will see them as the same, so I've also attached a screenshot showing the two pages side by side in Adobe Reader 8. They certainly look different to me.

Incidentally, I've never noticed a problem with Adobe Reader on anything else, so I figure I must be pretty up to dat with fonts et.

**Odat** · 27 March 2008, 09:39 PM

I just updated my linux reader to 8.12 and it still displays the same and I get the same error message. Attached is a smallish screen grab of what the text looks like for me.

**Colin Carpenter** · 28 March 2008, 09:32 AM

Curiouser and curiouser ... I just looked at the PDF on my laptop (XP Pro SP2 Adobe Reader 8.1) and both pages seem fine, yet my desktop shows the pages as shown on the screenshot.

**NeilH** · 28 March 2008, 11:34 AM

This may be something to do with a change we've made for 4.0. We no longer embed the 14 base fonts in PDF files, even if the embedding option is selected in export settings. However we do still embed the fonts for PDF/X export. To help us narrow this problem down can you try viewing the attached pdfx file (which has fonts embedded) to see if that displays ok? I removed the bitmaps leaving just the text by the way.

Thanks

Neil

**Colin Carpenter** · 28 March 2008, 12:03 PM

Yes, that PDF displays correctly on my desktop PC (the one that gives the strange results) as shown in the attached screenshot.

**NeilH** · 28 March 2008, 01:21 PM

Ok thanks Colin. Can you try exporting a PDF which uses a non-standard font (or a few different fonts which you have installed). Export it with font embedding turned on (should be ok) and then also with font embedding off. Do the 2 PDFs look the same when viewed on the same machine (which has all the fonts required)?

Thanks

Neil

**Colin Carpenter** · 28 March 2008, 01:50 PM

Hi Neil,

I created 4 lines of text in v4.0, top line was Arial, 2nd line was Balthazar, 3rd line was Bermuda Solid, 4th line was Times New Roman.

Exported as v5 PDF with "fonts embedded" switched on and the resulting PDF displays as shown on the attached screenshot (on the same PC that created the PDF).

Tried exporting with "fonts embedded" switched off and Extreme crashed with access violations, forcing a quit. Can try it again if you like?

Did try again and got this message "PDF filter encountered a general problem. PDF export is aborted (0004)"
Then "Access Violation at offset 0x060BB39A" if that means anything.

**Charles Moir** · 28 March 2008, 02:05 PM

OK we understand the problem. We stopped embedding the core14 fonts that include Times, Helvetica (Arial) and Courier, as these are meant to be guaranteed to be available on all PS interpreters and PDF readers.

But it seems we're not using the correct font names, so the PDF viewers can't always find the font (depends on your system and reader as to how good it is at finding the right equivalent).

Time is such that we'll just back out of this change and revert back to the 3.2 behaviour, which means the core set will be embedded if you select to embed fonts. Just means an increase in PDF file size when you have embedded and are using any of these three. In fact this is what Adobe does, so they should know I guess.

Bottom line we can fix this for the final release next week.