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Mac encourages font theft?

eclipse

eclipse

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 18, 2005
986
13
Sydney
Hi all,

Microsoft Publisher is not (and I don't think ever has) been available for Mac, but it has an interesting feature, in that it seems to be able to save to PDF with fonts viewing as they should, but without them being embedded in the PDF the way that Adobe Creative Suite and Quark do.

For an e-mag I do I have to manually import each page of the PDF's into Illustrator, and then convert all the text to outline, and then make a new PDF of the pages, which takes about 2.5 hours to do. I have to do this so that a client can use it online without any copyright infringement of fonts. That is the only way I know of to keep the fonts looking right, without being embedded in the PDF. MS Publisher seems to do something else entirely when making PDFs.

Does anyone know of other routines to solve this problem?
 
B

btbrossard

macrumors 6502a
Oct 25, 2008
973
11
Chicagoland
As far as copyright - for the most part embedding fonts into a PDF wouldn't be considered copyright infringement depending on the font license you hold with the font vendor. Embedding a font in a PDF so it is viewable/printable on remote machines is different than giving the font away with others to do with as they please. And certainly once you've converted a font to outlines - it's not a font anymore. It's a vector graphic.

Some fonts will not allow you to convert to outlines or embed in a PDF. For those fonts, I generally suggest finding a different font.

As far as MS Publisher is concerned - you best bet would be to avoid clients that can only supply files that come from Publisher.

Short of that - I use Enfocus Pitstop inside Acrobat to embed fonts into problematic PDF files. You can also use Pitstop to convert the fonts to outlines, if you wish.

Pitstop allows a global change so that all pages of the PDF get changed with one action (saving considerable time).
 
Last edited:
MisterMe

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
eclipse said:
...

Does anyone know of other routines to solve this problem?
Click to expand...
You are operating from a completely false premise. Adobe is one of if not the biggest font vendor and licensee/licensor on Earth. It will do nothing and has done nothing to promote font piracy.

It is important to understand that PDF is not an object-oriented file format. The method by which fonts are embedded in PDF files does not lend itself to repurposing those fonts.
 
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