Composite fonts in PDF's imported into Quark

[BillS]

We receive some ads as PDF's saved directly from InDesign that contain composite fonts. Pitstop Pro preflight confirms the presence of the composite fonts. We import PDF ads into Quark publication layouts. After the books are complete we make a large PDF/X-1a of the entire publication via Distiller for production. (This workflow has served us very well for a long time.)

The PDF's containing composite fonts import jsut fine into Quark 4.11 under Classic or OS 9 and in turn generate fine publication PDF's. These ad PDF's also import fine into Quark 6. But when we go to generate .ps from the publication file Quark 6 informs us that screen fonts for the composite fonts are not available on the system and Distiller errors on the resulting .ps. Every page containing one of these PDF's with composite fonts results in this Distiller error.

If we "refry" the offending PDF's (by saving them as Postscript Level 2 files from Acrobat and re-Distillling), they go through our workflow with no problems (although Quark still complains about the unavailability of the screen fonts). The odd thing is that Pitstop Pro reports that these refried PDF's still contain composite fonts, and so do the final publication PDF's.

The problem can also be solved by resaving the ad PDF's from Acrobat as Level 2 EPS files. As long as Acrobat is set to include the fonts and leave the color unchanged (no ICC profiles), the eps files import into Quark and in turn generate good publication PDF/X-1a files. These files again contain the composite fonts according to Pitstop.

Does anyone know what's happening here? Why does refrying or saving as .eps fix the problem even though the fonts remain as composites?

Thanks.

Bill