Wednesday, November 25, 2020

How to Embed Fonts in a PDF

Did you know that you can embed fonts in PDF documents? Embedded fonts are key for ensuring that your documents always turn out how you expect them to.

When sharing PDF documents you’ve made in InDesign, you might have been surprised to find out that the fonts didn’t display how you expected on other people’s devices. Why does this happen? This is the result of the fonts you used not being available on the device that is displaying it. Luckily, there is a way to solve this by ensuring that all fonts used are embedded in the PDF. This allows anyone to view the fonts in the way you intended.

So you may be wondering, how do I embed fonts in a PDF? Luckily, you're in the right place! In this quick tip, we’ll show you how to embed fonts in InDesign. 

Follow along with us over on our Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel:

What You’ll Need

You can use any InDesign document you are working on that includes fonts. A file with many different fonts would benefit from embedding.

I'll be using this InDesign Magazine Template from Envato Elements. 

How to Embed Fonts in InDesign

Step 1

Start off by creating a new document in InDesign, or open up an existing InDesign document you want to create a PDF from.

In our case, we’ll be using this document from Envato Elements.

Open Up Document

Step 2

The InDesign embed fonts method is simple, if you know where to look. To get to the font embed settings, go to File > Export.

Open up Export Window

Step 3

This will open the Export dialog window. From here, create a file name for your PDF document. Then select the Format dropdown menu and select Adobe PDF (Print).

Select PDF as File Type

Step 4

Once you’re happy with your settings here and have ensured your document is the PDF type, go ahead and press Save to open up the export options.

Select Save

Step 5

You will now be presented with the Export Adobe PDF dialog window. As you can see, there are a lot of settings to review here. To get to settings related to font embedding, select Advanced from the side menu.

Select Advanced Tab

Step 6

You will now have access to the Font settings. As you can see, the settings related to font embedding only have a single value. So how does InDesign embed fonts? In order to ensure that all the fonts in the document are embedded fonts, we’ll set this to 0%.

Set Subset Font Percentage

Step 7

Now go ahead and select Export, and all of your fonts will be embedded into the document.

Export PDF

There you have it—now you know how to embed fonts in InDesign!

Some Extra Things to Think About

Not every type of font can be embedded in PDF documents. While TrueType and OpenType fonts will be embedded, Type 1 fonts cannot be embedded fonts with InDesign. Some TrueType fonts also cannot be embedded due to license issues, so always make sure to check out the license agreement for any of the fonts that you use.

Another thing to keep in mind is that embedding all of your fonts in the document may increase the file size. While this should be small in most cases, this might add up in cases where you have a large document with many different fonts. If you have restrictions on the file size of your document, it’s a good idea to go through some of the other advanced settings to adjust the quality.

Conclusion

InDesign makes it very easy in most cases to embed fonts in a PDF. Even though there are some cases where fonts won’t be embedded, by utilizing the advanced export feature, we can ensure that all available fonts for embedding can be embedded right into the PDF. This is a great way to make sure that your PDF documents display exactly how you expect them to. 

In this tutorial, we addressed the question "How do I embed fonts in a PDF?" Found this quick tip on how to embed fonts in a PDF useful? Check out these other free tutorials from Envato Tuts+.

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