tedster - 4:12 am on Apr 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

Each embedded font seems to add about 10kb to the file. So one thing we can do to keep the file size reasonable is not to use a large number of fonts when we create a PDF for web use. Using lots of fonts isn't very good design in most cases, so it's not too tough a restriction.

I've been doing a bit of research on this issue, because one of my clients requires a tightly formatted newsletter. Some of this information is probably well known to many, but I thought it would be good to put the information here.

Acrobat Reader includes a few basic fonts when it's installed. Adobe calls these the Base 14 fonts. You can count on these, so they don't need to be embedded:

- Courier (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic)
- Arial MT (Regular, Bold, Oblique, and Bold Oblique)
- Times New Roman PS MT (Roman, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic)
- Symbol
- ZapfDingbats

Notice - no Helvetica! Also notice, Arial MT not plain-old Arial. Arial MT usually comes close enough, but I've heard that there can be notceable differences. When in doubt, I embed.

So what happens if you don't embed? There are two special fonts (Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif) that Acrobat uses as substitutes when a non-embedded font is called for but not present on the user's machine. The Acrobat engine stretches or compresses one of these fonts to ensure that the text in the document does not re-flow. But it can sure make for some pretty crude looking lines of text.