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I have a PDF and need to edit its text.

It has an embedded font and I'm not able to find the font to install. Is it possible to edit the text and maintain its embedded font when I don't have the font installed?

I'm editing with Acrobat X and its warning me that I don't have the font and forcing me to change the font of the text I want to edit to one that I have installed. I've Googled for a couple hours and found the font family, but not the variation that's embedded. Because the font is already in the document, I would have thought Acrobat or another software program could tap it to allow me to edit, though I'm guessing I'm missing something.

Kurt Pfeifle
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buttonsrtoys
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1 Answers1

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It depends...

1.

Most likely, your embedded font is a subset of the full font. That means that it contains only these glyphs (shapes that represent printable characters) which were required as representations for characters used by the original PDF.

If your edit wants to insert a character that wasn't present in the original PDF, Acrobat (or any other editing method) has to use a different font. The font embedded in the PDF simply doesn't have glyph that is suitable for your edit!

Also, your subsetted font's name is not exactly like the full set font's name: it uses has a randomly composed 6 uppercase character prefix with a +-sign to build the used font name, like ABCXYZ+Arial.

You could employ the free (as in beer) Acrobat Plugin FontReporter to generate a list of all glyphs contained in your font.

You can also use this answer:

to extract the font in question.

Then open the extracted font (which will be the subset variant, mind you!) in FontForgehttp://fontforge.github.io/en-US/), and there check two things:

  1. the original font's license
  2. the original font's creator

With that knowledge you could then definitely find the variant of the family that is embedded (or rather: that was present when the PDF generating and font embedding software created the subset).

2.

If the (subsetted) font you are looking at uses a so called "custom encoding", it may be almost impossible to edit the PDF file with standard tools (even if you have the same font locally installed that was used to create the PDF file).

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Kurt Pfeifle
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  • I followed your tip about FontReporter and the embedded font is indeed a subset. From FontReporter: Producer: wkhtmltopdf, NimbusSansL-Bold, Character collection: Adobe-Identity-0, CIDFontType2, Embedded, Subset, CID x0000 (69 glyphs). Any advice on the best way to proceed with this info? Googling NimbusSansL-Bold gets lots of hits but they all install as "NimbusSansL" or "NimbusSanL". I need them to install as "NimbusSansL-Bold" to be recognized as the same font as the embedded one. – buttonsrtoys Jan 07 '15 at 13:37
  • @buttonsrtoys: *'Nimbus\**' are fontnames which Ghostscript uses. They serve as drop-in replacements/clones of *'Helvetica\*'*. However, whenever Ghostscript uses these fonts, they appear under the name '*Helvetica\**' inside the PDF. `wkhtmltopdf` is too stupid to know that Nimbus\* are meant as clones for Helvetica\* and uses the the 'wrong' name. These fonts are available as packages for various platforms, frequently named `gs-fonts` or `ghostscript-fonts` or `urw-fonts`. – Kurt Pfeifle Jan 07 '15 at 17:25
  • @buttonsrtoys: **[Here](http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=tree;f=urwfonts;hb=HEAD)** is the Git repository with the latest version of the URW fonts. – Kurt Pfeifle Jan 07 '15 at 17:30