Solving font weirdness in Adobe Distiller

This was a strange one. I installed a whole stack of fonts that must have included a corrupt version of Times New Roman. Everything looked fine on screen but when I generated a PDF from FrameMaker using the Adobe PDF printer driver, the characters in Times New Roman got strangely mangled.

As it happened, the only thing that used Times New Roman in the template I was using was page number in the index. These came out with hash marks followed by numbers that were completely different from the numbers in the original index:

I went into Control Panel > Fonts and deleted the Times New Roman fonts, then downloaded new versions from typedfont.com.

Note: If you’re using typedfont.com you might not, at first sight, notice the download link. It’s a little link halfway down the page, just above the font table:

However, after installing the new fonts (in Vista: right-click the font file and choose Install), the problem remained.

The problem is that when there’s a font problem the printer’s Font Substitution Table gets modified, telling the driver to use another font instead of the font that has a problem. You can repair the font, but the Font Substitution Table doesn’t get modified back to remove the substitution. You’ve got to do that yourself.

To remove the font substitution for a printer (in my case the Adobe PDF “printer”):

1. Go to Control Panel > Printers.
2. Right-click the affected printer and choose Properties.
3. In the Properties dialog box, go to the Device Settings tab.
4. Expand the section headed Font Substitution Table:

     

5. Find the affected font.
6. Click the substituted font and change the setting back to <Don’t Substitute>:

   

7. Click OK.
8. While you’re about it – for good measure – go to the General tab.
9. Click Printing Preferences.
10. In the Printing Preferences dialog box, go to the Paper/Quality tab.
11. Click Advanced:

    

12. In the Advance Options dialog box, change the TrueType Font setting to Download as Softfont:

    

13. Change the PostScript Output Option to Optimize for Portability.
14. Change the TrueType Font Download Option to Outline.
15. Click OK on all the open dialog boxes.

If you were having the same problem I was having, it will now be fixed.