Embedding Fonts in PDFs with Adobe Acrobat

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If you're preparing a paper for a conference submission or if you just want to ensure that your .pdf looks exactly the same on someone else's computer as it does on yours, then you need to know how to embed the fonts used in your pdf in the file itself. In this article, I'll explain how to do this in Windows using the popular Adobe Acrobat software and show you how to verify that you've done it successfully. For information on how to embed fonts using Linux, check out the companion article How to embed fonts in pdfs in Linux.

Embedding Fonts in Windows

To embed fonts in your PDF files in Windows, the easiest tools to use are Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Distiller. Using Distiller is, perhaps, the most straightforward, but it has the disadvantage of removing any formatting or tagging information that you've added to your PDF file. This method essentially "prints" the PDF file to another PDF file, this time with all fonts embedded. Telling Distiller to add fonts is as simple as changing the appropriate values in your preferences.

A more interesting and more flexible method of embedding fonts is to use Adobe Acrobat. For this method, you first select the TouchUp Text Tool as shown in the graphic below.

First, select text that uses the font that you'd like to embed. Right click on the selection and choose properties as shown below. You can then choose to embed your font and optionally subset it. Subsetting means that only the portions of the font that are actually used in the document are included in the file. This means that the file will be somewhat smaller, but it also means that someone that wishes to edit your file won't be able to. For conference submissions, you should usually choose to subset your font. If these options are grayed out, there is a trick that you can employ to fix it. Change the font to another font for which embedding is allowed and then change it back to your original font. I would guess that this causes Acrobat to load your font from scratch and that somehow makes it realize that it can embed it after all.

Hopefully, you've figured out how to embed your fonts and did so successfully. There are a number of ways to verify that you've succeeded in Adobe Acrobat. The easiest is to go to the File menu and down to Document Properities. Under the Fonts tab you'll see each of the fonts that your document uses listed and whether or not it is embedded. Happy font embedding!