Comments on: OpenType Small Caps Glitches

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:15:01 +0000

Michael, I assume you also posted in the Adobe U2U forum based on the font.

This does appear to be a bug in the document fonts feature. The only workaround I can suggest right now is not packaging those fonts (or moving those fonts out of the document fonts folder) and make sure you report it to Adobe.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:15:14 +0000

Part of this must be an InDesign issue. We are using a font “Motter Corpus Std” regular (Adobe font folio font) and using small caps at 80% scaling. We recently upgraded from CS3 to CS5 and did a clean install of the fonts.

When this file is packaged, the packaged InDesign file reverts from small caps to lower case (though if you highlight the text it still shows in the palette as small caps but it clearly is not.)

This a really bad issue as small caps are a basic type setting tool.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:52:06 +0000

@breblin: I would be wary of that approach. Just because AI can open PDF files doesn’t mean that you’re always going to get the same thing coming out as going in. Illustrator is NOT a PDF editor. What you describe may work, especially for simple PDF files, but check the results carefully for changes.

By: breblin

breblin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:24:40 +0000

There is another work around to In-Design created pdf files that don’t print out the fonts correctly, or throw in strange characters (like bullets all over the place). You can open the pdf pages in illustrator, (more than likely you will get a message that says the font is missing but you know it isn’t), then replace what font it “thinks” is missing with the actual correct font that is in the file. Then save the file/page as pdf from illustrator. This will work with other issues that come up from In-Design created pdf files also. Or, if possible, export the pages as eps files instead (mostly for pre-press operators).

By: Ralf Herrmann

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:02:51 +0000

Speaking of turning off subsetting:
You need to check the EULA of your fonts. Nowadays most font vendors ONLY allow font embedding if you use subsetting, because a fully embedded font could be extracted from the PDF.

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:03:03 +0000

The only issue with subsetting is file size. Some of these fonts can really bloat a PDF. But that shouldn’t be an issue with a PDF heading to press. Fully embedding fonts is the safest way to avoid problems.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:04:23 +0000

Anthony, I do believe it’s a RIP issue. As I said in the post, only a very small percentage of ID users (in my experience) ever have a problem with OT Small Caps. Since we’re all using the same application, the difference has to be the output device.

And, entering text as all caps and then scaling them manually falls into my “blech” category of fixes …

I do wish, though, that there was a way to turn off the substitution and force ID to scale the OT characters as it does for T1 and TT characters. I’ve heard from other users who would like this option even though their OT SC print fine… because they need the SCs at a larger size, for a particular project, for example. They’re willing to trade off the beauty of the custom-cut SC for more control.

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:28:59 +0000

Ole Kvern hates subsetting fonts when exporting PDF files from InDesign for print. He’s convinced that subsetting causes all kinds of problems like this (and global warming, and so on), so he sets the Subset Fonts percentage to 0% instead of 100%.

I totally agree with Bob that turning on “Download PPD Fonts” in the Graphics pane of the Print dialog box is also important.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:07:40 +0000

This has happened in my office, and I figured out a quick-and-dirty solution. We assumed the problem was our RIP software, but now that I see this post, I know it’s an Indesign/typeface format issue.

The best fix is rather than click the “Small Caps” button to force a Small Caps on a typeface without an actual small caps, we take a full cap and scale by 70% vertically and horizontally. This is what Indesign does anyway to force a small cap (check your preferences, you can set it to whatever you want). I’ve heard from a lot of designers that 80% is better visually, but here at the office, the norm is 70%.

Hope this all works for you.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:02:02 +0000

So something to do with subsetting, eh … makes sense! I’ll riffle through the old e-mails and see if I can follow-up with the questioners.