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.
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.
after updating to the CC version of InDesign, we are now missing the letters fl in all words containing those letters. Is there a solution to the problem other then changing the font?
@Bonnie : What typeface are you using? Is it an OpenType font? Is it only the ligature ‘fl’ that is missing?
We are using Helvetica True Type. Yes fl are the only letters missing.
I haven’t seen it in other documents, but we are not using Helvetica in those. It seem to be just with Helvetica. We were planning on changing the font – but the style sheets seem to be messed up and our catalog is over 300 pages.
It could be that the font was replaced with a different version, or something is corrupted somewhere. Remember that fonts are software, too, so things can go wrong, especially when there are operating system changes. I haven’t heard of this happening with the new version of InDesign. But it’s sometimes worth rebuilding your preference files after upgrading to a new version: https://creativepro.com/resources/faq
The Fonts and Postscript portions of the Graphics panel are disabled. This is a recent install of 2017, on Windows 10. Do you know how to enable those options?