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Doug Freese - 27 May 2005 04:42 GMT

I produce a monthly newsletter for my running club in which about 25%
receive it online after I convert it to PDF. I have found that unless I
stay with very vanilla fonts like Times New Roman and Arial many online
readers get error messages they can't open font X. Is there a standard
set of fonts(or font library) that exists on most operating systems?
Every time I try to add some font pizzazz I get into trouble. I can't
test this before I ship it because I obviously have the fonts.

Any thoughts or a place I can look?

-Doug Freese

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Robert M. Franz (RMF) - 27 May 2005 08:35 GMT

Hi Doug

> I produce a monthly newsletter for my running club in which about 25%
> receive it online after I convert it to PDF. I have found that unless I
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> Every time I try to add some font pizzazz I get into trouble. I can't
> test this before I ship it because I obviously have the fonts.

There is such a set of fonts, but I don't really know where to look for
right now.

FWIW, how do you convert your documents to PDF? Beceause, if you have,
say, Acrobat (the full version), you _can_ in fact test what anyone else
sees: IIRC, somewhere in the View menue, you can specify to "Use local
fonts" when opening a PDF in Acrobat, which you would *not* want to do
for your purpose.

Of course, if you have Acrobat, you can also specify in your joboptions
that the fonts shall be included (fully or as a subset), so that anyone
opening this file should see what you intended to!

Greetinx
Robert

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Doug Freese - 27 May 2005 11:26 GMT

> FWIW, how do you convert your documents to PDF? Beceause, if you have,
> say, Acrobat (the full version), you _can_ in fact test what anyone
> else sees: IIRC, somewhere in the View menue, you can specify to "Use
> local fonts" when opening a PDF in Acrobat, which you would *not* want
> to do for your purpose.

Hi Robert,

> There is such a set of fonts, but I don't really know where to look
> for right now.

If anyone does know......

> FWIW, how do you convert your documents to PDF?

I only have the free reader. Haven't be able to justify the full short
for what I do. I purchased "adoc2pdf" converter for the little bit of
PDF work that I need. In addition, if I did use the full shot, I would
never be able to give up this newsletter when I grow tired of it. I'm
trying to keep the job simple and contained within Word which is at
least popular.

It sure would be nice if Word had a save as PDF option. About as likely
as security being added to the Windows operating system. ;)

> Of course, if you have Acrobat, you can also specify in your
> joboptions that the fonts shall be included (fully or as a subset), so
> that anyone opening this file should see what you intended to!

I don't have it but I do have friends with full Adobe but my concern
would be size. Including all or some of the fonts might just blow up the
size of the file such that some of the ISPs would balk at its size or
those with dial-up would need tickets to a movie while downloading. :)
The file even in compressed PDF format is hefty and I'm trying to keep
it streamlined.

Thanks for your time.

-Doug

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Robert M. Franz (RMF) - 27 May 2005 12:02 GMT

> If anyone does know......

OK, I "groups.googled" for you (FWIW, comp.text.pdf deals with such
questions), see a list of "Base14" fonts mentioned in

http://groups.google.ch/group/comp.text.pdf/browse_frm/thread/b8469e8e2c90cf41/8
e5c7955b663b755?q=base+fonts+list+group:*pdf*&rnum=1&hl=de#8e5c7955b663b755

> I only have the free reader. Haven't be able to justify the full short
> for what I do. I purchased "adoc2pdf" converter for the little bit of
> PDF work that I need. In addition, if I did use the full shot, I would
> never be able to give up this newsletter when I grow tired of it. I'm
> trying to keep the job simple and contained within Word which is at
> least popular.

:-)

Then you might want to have a look at the site of whoever sold/supports
this adoc2pdf. They should know whether it's possible to embed and/or
subset fonts.

> It sure would be nice if Word had a save as PDF option. About as likely
> as security being added to the Windows operating system. ;)

I agree it would be nice. Security seems to be constantly added to the
Windows operation system. Hackers are adding constantly, too :-(

> I don't have it but I do have friends with full Adobe but my concern
> would be size. Including all or some of the fonts might just blow up the
> size of the file such that some of the ISPs would balk at its size or
> those with dial-up would need tickets to a movie while downloading. :)
> The file even in compressed PDF format is hefty and I'm trying to keep
> it streamlined.

One or two embedded fonts, even without subsetting, doesn't bloat your
file. And if you are using too many fonts, you might want to reconsider
anyway, from a typographical standpoint. Rule of thumb: Use 1 or 2 fonts
at max for anything you do (that has nothing to do with PDF :-)).

HTH
Robert

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\ / | MVP
X Against HTML | for
/ \ in e-mail & news | Word

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Doug Freese - 28 May 2005 00:38 GMT

> Then you might want to have a look at the site of whoever
> sold/supports this adoc2pdf. They should know whether it's possible to
> embed and/or subset fonts.

Since looking at what seems to apply across operating systems. i.e. very
limited I will look into embeding fonts. Should be an easy tast to see
what the grow is.

> I agree it would be nice. Security seems to be constantly added to the
> Windows operation system. Hackers are adding constantly, too :-(

Now let's be a little realistic, there is very little security and what
they do add are Band-Aids that come as patches. It would take a major
rewrite to the OS which Mr. Gates et al. does not want to spend now. He
is a little busy tilting and the European anti-trust people. :) I used
to work in Operating Systems and when the government is a customer you
secure first and then ask if it's too much.. ;)

> One or two embedded fonts, even without subsetting, doesn't bloat your
> file. And if you are using too many fonts, you might want to
> reconsider anyway, from a typographical standpoint. Rule of thumb: Use
> 1 or 2 fonts at max for anything you do (that has nothing to do with
> PDF :-)).

The vast majority of the doc is Arial and Times with variations of size,
bolding and underlining. For he lead-in and highlighting important
things I like to toss in a different font. At most it would 4 but I do
know how irritation a doc can be when one changes fonts too frequently.

Ok, thanks for your help. I have enough to go and hang myself.

-Doug

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Margaret Aldis - 27 May 2005 21:56 GMT

>> FWIW, how do you convert your documents to PDF? Beceause, if you have,
>> say, Acrobat (the full version), you _can_ in fact test what anyone else
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> If anyone does know......

Funnily enough, I was looking for the list myself yesterday and found this
one:

http://www.msfrontpage.net/fp/ans-standardfonts.htm

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP

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Doug Freese - 28 May 2005 00:22 GMT

>> Funnily enough, I was looking for the list myself yesterday and found
>> this
> one:
>
> http://www.msfrontpage.net/fp/ans-standardfonts.htm

Merci!
-Doug

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Jezebel - 28 May 2005 00:40 GMT

One of the points of PDF is that it solves this problem for you: just make
sure the fonts are embedded, not substituted. This is one of the easier PDF
conversion settings.

>I produce a monthly newsletter for my running club in which about 25%
>receive it online after I convert it to PDF. I have found that unless I
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> -Doug Freese

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