The Case of the Missing Characters
Every now and again, we hear from people who experience missing characters when they print from InDesign. For example, there might be whitespace where there should be apostrophes, trademark symbols, and other “high ASCII” characters.
The problem often comes down to the printer substituting its own built-in fonts for the ones you specified in your document, and having a little trouble with the substitution. To force the printer to use the robust fonts on your computer instead of its own 90-pound weakling versions, make sure that the “Download PPD Fonts” checkbox is selected in the Graphics pane of the Print dialog box.
The Graphics pane of the Print dialog box
Why did Adobe sneak this font feature into the Graphics pane? Just to keep you on your toes, I guess.
Note that we also talked about the Download PPD Fonts feature back in Episode 77.
Second paragraph, “littel” goes to “little”. Great post.
[[Fixed. Thanks. --db]]
Windows users may be seeing the issue discussed in microsoft kb article 952909
support.microsoft.com/kb/952909/
Is there a way to “download ppd fonts” when exporting to pdf?
@RW: No, when you make a PDF, the fonts are always downloaded, as far as I know. There’s no way to stop it.
When you export a PDF there is no PPD in the equation, thus, there are no ppd fonts to download.
But, as David says, ALL fonts are downloaded when you export a PDF, so if your PDF is destined to be printed at some point to a printer that does have a PPD, the fonts that might be both in it and in your PDF are indeed in the PDF where you need them.
My problem is when exported to pdf my textparts loose characters when printing on our laserprinters, not on my deskjet.
The characters are normal ones, mostly the first on the lefthandside of the text even when I’m using Arial or other standard fonts. It puzzles me….any idea?
@Jack: This sounds more like a problem when printing your PDF, so perhaps an issue with Acrobat? Or perhaps a problem with your printer driver.