PDFs only work properly with TrueType fonts

[Toby B]

Just thought others might like to know about this BUG I came across.

If you save a PDF of a Filemaker Layout that uses Postscript Type 1 or OpenType fonts you will most likely get unwanted character substitutions in the resulting PDF, even though the characters look fine on screen in either Browse or Preview modes.

However if you only use TrueType fonts ... 99% of the time (depends on the font in question) the PDF will be generated correctly.

I encountered this when trying to export a PDF that contained Bullet Points "•" (keystroke Opt-8 under MacOS). My bullet points were showing up as inch marks in the PDF.

After running some tests on a range of different fonts I found that some fonts worked fine whilst others outputted the inch marks, and others still would output blank spaces.

With some more investigation all the fonts that worked perfectly turned out to be TrueType fonts. None of the Postscript Type 1 or OpenType fonts worked.

I have not tested whether printing directly to the PDF Distiller engine that comes with Acrobat Professional instead of using the PDF Library that Filemaker uses internally would fix this (I don't have a copy of Acrobat Pro) maybe somone out there could test this and reply to this topic with their findings.

I would not be surprised if this indeed turns out to fix the issue as even Indesign's inbuilt "save as PDF" function (which I believe uses an embedded copy of the same PDF Lib licenced to Filemaker) creates "dirty" PDFs. By "dirty" I mean, it is not as good as printing to the Distiller engine when it comes to creating clean print production files.

[fabriceN]

It also wouldn't show well on a PC.

So yes, with FileMaker, you can basically choose between Verdana and Verdana... unless Stuart says something else ;)

[mf]

You are right. TrueType is the safest way to go. We had to order the TrueType version of the font we liked (which was OpenType)... it was not Verdana.

In my experience, creating a PDF (save as PDF) does not render as well as using Acrobat Distiller.

(I'm using Windows).