Now I am in the position where when I try to make a PDF, I cannot embed that font!
I generate the initial PDF from MS Word. Regardless of whether I ask for PDF/A or not, Word won't (can't) embed it.
When I try to save out from Editor as either PDF/A or PDF/X, Editor: tries to embed the font(s), finds some errors ("glyph is missing in embedded font"), reports errors having been fixed, ...and then fails to save any file. Whether "Rasterize the unembedded fonts" is selected or not doesn't seem to make any difference.
The problem seems to be that the font explicitly defines a huge number of code positions without specifying any corresponding glyph, as seen in Character Map. Please help!
The only options I seem to have at the moment are all bad.
- Accept the PDF without the font embedded, which means that recipients won't see what I intended.
- Let Word rasterise the unembedded Zilla Slab fonts, which then get output as rasterised images of entire paragraphs, which looks OK from a distance (but not close up), but is not searchable, text cannot be highlighted, and so on.
- Manually edit all fonts in the family to remove the troublesome codepoints. This seems like a nightmare to do manually, and I don't even know if it would solve the problem.
- Go back to 'square one' and find another font family to format my document with.
1. Is this a bug with the font?
2. Does the PDF specification prevent fonts with "missing" glyphs from being embedded?
3. Can Editor be tweaked to handle this (provide an automatic fix)? E.g. automatically remove codepoints with missing glyphs?
It's possible that the issue may be that I've inadvertently used one of the codepoints with a missing glyph, and Word has silently rendered it with a 'similar' font, which is OK for viewing in Word and printing, but — perhaps — not OK for making a PDF with the font embedded.
If so, then it would allow another possible workaround:
- Manually hunt through the text in my document, looking for 'exotic' characters specified as Zilla Slab but actually rendered with glyphs from another font (because the glyphs are missing in Zilla Slab).
I can't be certain where I downloaded Zilla Slab from (it was last year, I think): more likely the github link, but it's readily available elsewhere too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilla_Slab
^^Note forum syntax glitch.
—DIV