Graphic designers: whats the mysterious missing link between a home-made PDF and a universally-printable ad image?
I asked some designy friends how this could be, when a PDF is itself a photo of the image of the ad. The PDF does contain an image of the dogs. However, within these files, text is represented as regular text (ASCII or UTF, to be technical) with markup to declare it to be of font “whatever”. This makes it easy to change the font, and works great on your machine, because you found the font and installed it on your computer; however the print shop didn’t do this step (pricey!) and hence the printer used the ugly font as a fall-back. PDF isn’t just a bitmap or image. It is in theory a Portable Document Format. This is supposed to mean you can ship it to a friend or print shop and they can both view and edit it. In practice, the software to edit PDFs is expensive and as you’ve discovered, fonts aren’t as portable as they should be.
