PDFs. Filesize and fonts.

[macmekker]

Hi.

I have seen the issue of FM 8 integrating fonts when creating pdfs being mentioned somewhere, but now I can not find any threads dedicated to this... So I was hoping somebody could guide me/give me the highlights...

My story in short:

The font we use for printing i our company: Myriad (all printing/pdf are done with Macs)

I am now upgrading our solution from FM6 to 8. A 24 page list saved as pdf (via "print") in the FM6 solution has a filesize of 530KB. Now - in 8 - it is 8,3 MB So I tried the new "Save as PDF" function, and the new filesize was 250K ! I was very happy for a few seconds. But when I opened the pdf doc - all was empty - or rather: it was still 24 pages, correct formatted with logo, lines and text presented with other fonts. But all text in Myriad was gone/empty.

SO is this function actually reduced to documents using a few selected fonts?

Edited December 19, 2005 by Guest

[mav]

Had this problem too . . .

In reading what's updated in v8.02, here's something :

1.5. On Mac OS X, fonts that have Postscript outlines instead of TrueType outlines no longer appear as out of range squares or invisible when saved to a PDF file.

For the whole list, see :

http://www.filemaker.com/support/updaters/fm8v2_mac.html

[mpretka]

I am having the same problem. See Post 185765 in this list. The 8.02 update has made a difference. Using Send/Save as pdf produces a pdf that looks ok but has no font information. Not useful for printing.

Outputting as postscript then distilling produces a pdf that seems ok. When you open the pdf and select pdf optomizer from the advanced window the fonts show and you have the option to embed them. I have not fully tested but the upgrade seemed to have made some improvements.

[mav]

It would also seem that you need to have the actual font installed on the computer to view the pdf's fonts . . .

Saving the page as PDF 'should' save the enough font information (in a format that anyone who has Acrobat Reader can open) in the file.

The 8.0v2 update only seems to have fixed 'half' the problem . . .

mav.

PS: I do have Acrobat 'Full' installed on the mac, which means I can use the built-in 'Adobe PDF' printer driver to build PDFs, but this method does not allow for PDFs to be named, built, saved to a directory, and an email created with the file as an attachment in one script

[hillborne]

I posted this in another thread but hope this helps:

I have the same problem but I think I found out why.

After printing to .pdf in OS X I looked at the 3 page .pdf that contained NO graphics and saw that it was 2.3 megs!

So I opened it up in Acrobat 7 Pro and tried to do an Optimize PDF command on it...tried and failed because it got hung up on the 'replacing duplicate fonts' process.

After force quitting and restarting Acrobat I opened it again and looked at the font situation. WOW!

In FMP I had only used helvetica and the only text style add I did was a bold; however, Acrobat said there were about 60 versions of helvetica in the .pdf. I manually deleted all but 1 each (regular and bold) and save again. That made the .pdf 232k.

So, if you have ACP7 it can be fixed. I have a guess that maybe everytime you have a different size or style of text, FMP is embedding a whole nother copy of the font so maybe convert every font to the same style and size to test whether the file is smaller.