On Feb 13, 2007, at 10:24 PM, Kristin Looney wrote:
When you create a pdf from Illustrator, it is suppose to imbed the fonts and graphics - so you shouldn't have to include all the fonts and graphics again. Right? I know that graphics get included... but I've never been able to trust that the fonts really for sure get included, so I always smash the outlines on the fonts when I'm sending art to a printer. Just to be SURE my fonts don't shift.
Fonts do indeed get included, although I have run across PDFs on occasion that were missing certain fonts. You can check if the fonts are embedded using Adobe Reader (formerly known as Acrobat Reader) by going to the document information (I think it's in the file menu), and clicking on the "Fonts" tab.
But if I'm putting a pdf of a flyer up for someone to download and print, I really want the file size as small as it can be, and smashing fonts greatly increases the file size. Here is a silly little test... http://www.wunderland.com/temp/smashing-fonts-test.pdf Did the font, Cookie, which most people probably don't have on their machines get imbedded in this pdf?
Yep, the font came through fine.
Does anyone NOT see same font in both paragraphs?
They look almost exactly the same. The font version came out slightly thicker, probably due to hinting. Fonts have special information embedded in them that allows them line up better with the pixels on a computer screen, so they don't come out looking really lumpy, jagged, or blurry. This shouldn't matter so much at 300 dpi, but does make a difference on screen (it makes a greater difference with smaller fonts, where being off by one pixel can make it look really weird). Font hinting is also not quite as essential with anti-aliasing, since the text will usually still be readable, but it improves the display quite a bit.
I'd leave the text as fonts, so that hinting will work correctly, as well as other features, like full-text search on systems that support it. You can always check to make sure the fonts got embedded properly by checking the information in Adobe Reader.