Missing Fonts when Printing

When using a function or object to print PDF files, you might sometimes see the print job fail, where some or all of the fonts are missing.

If you embed all of the fonts in a PDF document, it can be sent to any printer, on any system. The speed of the printing may vary depending on the hardware, but it should always work.

But if the fonts are not embedded in the document, the operating system tries to find them on the local machine. This can lead to a variety of potential problems:

• On a machine where the fonts are installed or can be located via APDFL resources, the document will print fine.
• If the system cannot find an appropriate font on the machine, the file should still print reasonably well if there are Multi-Master fonts available via APDFL resources. The Library will use the Multi-Master fonts to simulate the appearance of the missing fonts. Some of the glyphs might not be substituted correctly.
• If the system can’t find local fonts and it can’t find APDFL Multi-Master fonts either, or if the font is not Roman, you might not see anything print at all, or you might see small black or open rectangles where text should appear. This might also happen if you use PDPageDrawContentsToWindow or PDPageDrawContentstoMemory.

See Searching Font Resource Directories when Adobe PDF Library initializes for a description of the dirList array and how to populate it for use with your application.