I have a problem with a font which has the font family name 'Company Name Type Light' with the preferred name 'Company Name Type'. In the generated pdf the embedded font has the name 'CompanyNameType'. For the bold version of that font the embedded font is called 'CompanyNameType,Bold'.

On opening the pdf with Adobe Illustrator I get the errors 'The font CompanyNameType is missing... The font ComanyNameType,Bold is missing...'.

What is the rule for the naming of embedded fonts and why does Adobe Illustrator (bdw Acrobat works fine) not find the fonts. The fonts are installed and I can easily replace the 'unknown' fonts in Illustrator with the correct 'system installed' fonts.

Another problem is, that Illustrator does not show special caracters (äöüéèà...) correct - even after the fonts have been corrected/replaced. I am not sure if this two problems have the same root or are separate issues.

I know this is perhaps more an Adobe problem but I am glad for any information that could help solving it.

That does sound like more of an issue with Illustrator, but perhaps we can work around it. Do you get the same behaviour with both Prince 6.0 and the Prince 7.0 beta version?

I have tried it with Prince 7.0 beta and get the same 'font missing' error. But the problem with the special characters seems to be gone. When is the release date for the 7.0 Version?

I also made a test with Arial as the only font in the document and I get the same error. When I use Adobe Acrobat to check the embedded fonts it shows document icons with two 'T's (TrueType) on it. When I do the font replacement in Illustrator the corresponding fonts listed from the system do have an italic black and green 'O' (OpenType) as icon.

The final release date for 7.0 is not yet finalised, but so far it seems to be already more reliable than 6.0 for most tasks, and you are welcome to use the beta now.

Which operating system are you running Prince on? We can try installing the free trial of Illustrator and see if we can reproduce the problem.

I run Prince on Windows XP.

I did some tests with Prince 7.0 and found out that sometimes fonts get embedded with type 'TrueType' a coding 'Roman' and sometimes with type 'TrueType (CID)' and coding 'Identity-H'. With TrueType and Roman special characters don't show up correct in Illustrator, with TrueType(CID) and Identity-H they do.

In both cases Illustrator reports the 'missing font...' error on opening.

The problem with the special characters is much more severe since in Illustrator the font replacement in contrast to character replacement is relatively easy.

I have posted a comment concerning this issue on the appropriate Adobe forum.

I have read the posts in the Adobe forum - they do not really help.

The problem that illustrator does not recognize the fonts is tedious but that the accented characters are not always recognized correctly is a real problem. Could it be, that for Illustrator on Windows the problem is the Roman encoding?

It could be, but this really sounds like a bug in Illustrator. Perhaps the PDF could be passed through Acrobat or some other filter program before loading it? I'm not sure if that would help... Would you happen to have any support agreement in place with Adobe?

When are fonts embedded as 'TrueType' a coding 'Roman' and when as 'TrueType (CID)' and coding 'Identity-H'?

Prince uses MacRoman encoding whenever it can, as it is simpler and more efficient than using Identity encoding (direct glyph indices) and providing a separate ToUnicode map. This is only necessary when the document uses a character that is not found in the MacRoman encoding, such as a non-Latin character, some accented Latin characters, and special glyph forms such as ligatures.

Thank you for the information.

I found a work around for the problem with the special characters. I opened the pdf with Acrobat Professional and removed the embedded fonts. After that Illustrator takes the corresponding system fonts and displays everything correct.

You could also run prince with the --no-embed-fonts option.