Web client 11 does not display some fonts correctly on a pdf

asked on December 12

I have been running into this situation a lot, and it kind of feels random.

Some user will get a hold of me to tell me the PDF looks funny. Like this.

If they download the pdf and open it in another program like Reader or even Chrome, it looks fine.
If someone else tries to open the pdf on another workstation, sometimes it works. So it does seem like its a local computer issue.
The question would be, how do I troubleshoot this? There are no concerning errors in the browsers and even in the elements when I do the inspect. I have had my helpdesk try and update their Adobe Reader software and other things with no luck.
What else can I try and has anyone else run into this?

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replied on December 12

I would guess that there is a font used in the pdf that is not embedded in it. Workstations that have the font installed can display it, ones without it installed will run into the problem you are reporting.

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replied on December 12

So, how would someone go about installing fonts? When I looked it up, it was information about installing fonts for Adobe Reader.
Is there a recommended LF method?

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replied on December 12

Ideally, you could get the pdf producer to embed their fonts. Otherwise, you would need to first identify the font in question. Acrobat should tell be able to tell you, or the browser dev tools maybe could help. And then you would need to distribute it to your users, using whatever management tool your IT uses. If it works for some of your users, the font might be bundled with an application that you are already installing.

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replied on December 12

I found the font. It's Arial. Arial is shipped with Windows and has been forever. I double-checked the user's workstation, and they have the font. I even took the font files from my machine and copied them to hers, and it still didn't fix the issue.
What else can I try?

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replied on December 15

Is it plain Arial? There's a flavor of Arial that doesn't come with Windows. Arial Narrow, i think?

Adobe Reader might substitute the font when it opens the PDF.

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replied on December 15

This is what Adobe is showing me.

If Adobe is swapping fonts, how would I figure out what it is exactly? If Adobe can swap out fonts, why can't the web client do the same?

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replied on December 15

One thing that screenshot shows is that the fonts are not embedded, which is kind of the root cause. In the pdf I'm looking at, the fonts say "embedded subset". As for Arial, I'm not an expert but I see on my computer that I have both "Arial" and "Arial Rounded MT" (as well as "Arial Unicode MS"), so it certainly seems possible for users to have "Arial" installed but not have the specific, correct font available. Your document seems to request the "MT" version.

As for why Acrobat is more adaptable, the short answer is that it knows all the fonts available to it and can choose one to use as the next-best option. As far as I know, this is functionality provided by Acrobat-the-application and is totally independent of PDF-the-file-format. PDF doesn't have the notion of fall-back fonts the way html does - the designer specifies the exact font they want to use.

Web-based renderers have no idea what fonts the end user has installed and so don't have the information to make that sort of decision. There isn't that fall-back list that they could tell the browser what to do if the specified font is not available.

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Web client 11 does not display some fonts correctly on a pdf

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