Adobe InDesign an CID fonts

[jorgeda1]

I currently have some files from a customer that inlcude embedded CID fonts. The customer is exporting to a PDF file from InDesign. Does anyone know of any issues that deal with CID fonts and Indesign.

[Bart]

Adobe have been very cunning in their inclusion of CID fonts in InDesign PDFs. Only true Adobe Postscript 3 devices can output them correctly. Postscript emulators - and there are loads of them out there - didn't bother including this feature in their versions because there was no call for it in the western world.

Now anyone who complains to Adobe about it gets a 'your RIP is faulty' reply - grrrrr.........

So if you have a genuine Adobe Postscript 3 RIP then you won't have a problem outputting directly. However if you are imposing through Quark you may have a problem as Quark cannot translate these fonts either.

If you have any problems - save PDF as EPS Level 1 Postscript. That should convert all your fonts to Type 1.

[cari]

InDesign (Export to PDF) will embed fonts as double byte fonts, due to the fact that InDesign has OpenType support (OpenType fonts are Double Byte fonts)and it's Type engine is built around OpenType.
You will see double byte font inclusion in more and more applications, as they start to support OpenType and it wouldn't surprise me if CID encoding becomes a more common phenomenum

For now, you can bypass the CID font encoding by using the Distiller to generate PDFs from InDesign... I.e. Print to Adobe PDF and these fonts will be embedded as Type 1 one fonts. Ask your client to Print to Adobe PDF instead of Exporting to PDF from InDesign.

Indeed Adobe is correct in saying that it's the RIP that causes output issues with CID font encoding. And when RIP software has been updated, you will be able to correctly output PDF files containing CID / Double byte font encoding.

[AdobeHenk]

Cari is right. Internally, InDesign is a Unicode application, and with its Open Type support capable of supporting a large number of characters. Hence the use of CID encoding, which is a logical consequence of this unicode support, facilitating the representation of large character sets. And, although possibly no the most common occurence, InDesign isn't the only application producing CID encoding.

CID encoding is a standard feature of Adobe PostScript and has been in the language specification for a considerable amount of time. It's certainly not a cunning conspiracy by Adobe. Even most 'clone' manufacturers have been shipping RIP versions supporting these postscript features for quite some time now.

Note however, that unlike what Cari says, using Distiller instead is no guaranteed way of preventing CID encoding in PDF files; on occassion Distiller will also use CID encoding.

Henk

[cari]

Henk, exactly.... I could have been a bit clearer when using the term "for now"... :wink:
---always difficult to put into writing what you're thinking--- as I meant it could assist in a "temporary" fix... (with as you say ... no absolute guarantee....)

... really Service Providers should upgrade their RIP s/w to fully support this... so they can continue to provide services to their clients.

[pspdfppd]

Yeah, i tried to make all fonts type 1 (non cid) by distilling from ps but a couple of fonts remained in the cid encoding and thus unprintable by our level 2 laser printer.

However......I saved pages as eps's in level 2 which flattened them on the fly and redistilled them on distiller 4 to pdf on OS9 and they all converted to type 1 which printed.

I am the first one to admit that I have more tenacity than I do brains.....

So for now...till we can patch together the pieces of the upgrades, etc., this is gonna have to do......

[pspdfppd]

it's a four letter word beginning with "F"

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