3 Replies Latest reply: Nov 4, 2008 10:18 AM by Eric @ MCA RSS

    Insidious bug in Acrobat's preflight...

    RodneyA Community Member
      Just a warning for those who might use it...

      I have the most current version of the CS3 suite. I created a PDF file of my journal project, which uses Garamond Premiere Pro as a text font, using the "PressQuality" preset. I'd been having trouble with stray RGB files and overly thin lines, so I applied the Preflight profile "Digital Printing: Color" in Adobe Acrobat. This changes all colors to CMYK and also corrects problems in thin lines, among other problems.

      Now, when Preflight is done, it saves the file, and it looks just fine. You can print it, you can view it, all of the characters are there as expected. But surprise! If you close the file and open it again, a bunch of characters in Garamond Premiere Pro no longer display. All small caps are replaced by a box with an "x" through it, and also any three-character ligatures (such as ffi and ffl). But since this doesn't show up until you've closed and opened the document, it managed to get to the printers, who fortunately caught the error before it went to press.

      I'm hoping this won't happen in CS4, but in the mean time, don't use those profiles without a thorough check afterwards. Preflight is supposed to reveal problems, not cause them.
        • 1. Re: Insidious bug in Acrobat's preflight...
          Eric @ MCA Community Member
          Apparently this is somehow related to the Pro fonts in general. We've been fighting serious bad juju with Minion Pro for the last 9 months. And that is in CS2.

          Your most reliable fix will be to set fonts to "Entire Font" (or whatever it is instead of "Subset").

          Whenever I've set that, there are no further issues.

          BTW, our problems were occurring in the PDFs. Particularly after combining or splitting pages, re-optimizing etc etc etc.
          • 2. Re: Insidious bug in Acrobat's preflight...
            RodneyA Community Member
            Right, which is where my problems were occurring. I looked through the "Digital color" preflight profile, and there are no "fixups" relating to fonts (there are things about fonts that get flagged, but not that should get changed).

            I altered the original Press Quality preset in Indesign from "subset fonts below 100%" to "subset fonts below 1%," and made a new PDF. I was able to run the Digital Printing Color Preflight protocol in Acrobat, save it, open it again, and the fonts were okay. So thanks so much for the tip! That may have solved it.

            Rodney
            • 3. Re: Insidious bug in Acrobat's preflight...
              Eric @ MCA Community Member
              Yeah, it seems like Pro fonts can swap out with non-Pro or something? Or it can swap subsets around within the document when it shouldn't?

              As near as I can tell, using whole fonts everywhere gives you a safety net in that you can't lose characters as easily since all variants of the font have all characters so even if it plays musical fonts with all the embedded variants, they should all have characters to draw regardless of where they end up.