I have a couple clients that require PDF-X1a files for production. I use small caps very heavily in most of my books. I usually use text-transform: lowercase and font-variant: small-caps for this.

When I preflight my Prince-generated PDF in Acrobat, and convert to X1a, all of my smallcaps are converted to ordinary lowercase. Basically, the result of the font-variant: small-caps is wiped out.

I have gotten around it by exporting to PS using Acrobat, then converting that PS to PDF-X1a using Distiller.

Is there a different way of creating small caps that will avoid this issue? Or is there something I'm doing improperly? If not, can Prince output a PS rather than a PDF? This would allow me to skip that middle step, and I could just throw the PS into a hotfolder.

Sounds like a bug in Acrobat, but perhaps there is a way to work around it.

Would you be able to email me (mikeday@yeslogic.com) a PDF with small caps text generated with the --no-compress option? There might be some quirk of the ToUnicode dictionary in the PDF that is leading to Acrobat substituting the glyphs when it regenerates.

Will do. Naturally I'm now having a difficult time duplicating it, but I'll shoot that to you the very next time I encounter it. Thanks for the awesome product!