Fonts can sometimes be a big problem when trying to embed them into a pdf. You’ve designed your printed piece and it looks fantastic on screen. However, that quirky free font you downloaded from that website the other week just won’t play ball when you generate the pdf.

“Font cannot be embedded because of licensing restrictions”

This puts a bit of a spanner in the works, but there is a way around it. - Outline the font.

Applications like Quark*, Illustrator, and Indesign can outline fonts, allowing those without the font to receive artwork and not have to be concerned about the output being ruined by font substitution. After all, who wants to see courier or arial on your headline when you really wanted ‘big goudy typeface’?

In illustrator and indesign this can all be done by selecting the ‘offending font’ and then clicking :

Type … Create Outlines.

Remember though, to call this file something different - you don’t want to overwrite your editable text (original) as you may need to change things like addresses, phone numbers etc in the future. So save it as a recognisable file name, but at the end of the filename, call it ‘outlines’

• 1. The editable document is called for example “businesscard.eps”
• 2. You outline the fonts within the document and resave it as “businesscard-outlines.eps”
• 3. You can then then generate the pdf from “businesscard-outlines.eps” being confident that it won’t end up being substituted for courier or arial.

Any future amendments to the document are done on the original “businesscard.eps” and not the outlined file (as you’ll find you cant edit it!). Hence the reason for saving a differently named ‘outlined’ version of the file so that a ‘correct’ pdf can be generated.

*Quark will only let you outline one block of text at a time, great when your document is many pages long. For those without a sense of humour, theres some going free just round the corner if you’re quick enough.

Tags: print design

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