The confusing "subset fonts" issue reared its ugly head at a user group meeting this week and I was taken aback when the guest speaker (an InDesign user) gave recommended settings that differed from what Adobe engineers told me years ago.
You've seen this dialogue box a million times by now: Subset fonts when percent of characters used is less than XXX %. (This is in the Advanced section of the PDF export controls.)
The default is "when percent is less than 100%." But this guest speaker said it should be set to "less than 1%."
I'm asking the list for opinions on this setting. And I'd love to hear from any Adobe engineers.
Theoretical scenarios: English language, no other languages used in the document, OTF font has 5,000 glyphs and the document uses only 100 of them.
Scene 1: The percentage is set to "less than 100%" - If the document uses anywhere from 1 - 4,999 glyphs they will be subsetted to only the glyphs actually used.
Scene 2: The percentage is set to "less than 1%" - If the document uses anywhere from 1-49 glyphs they will be subsetted to only the glyphs actually used, and if the document uses 50 or more glyphs the entire font will be embedded rather than subsetted. (1% of 5,000 glyphs = 50)
I think the 1% solution of scene #2 is OK if you're using TTF and PS fonts with only 216 glyphs. 1% = only 2 glyphs so this setting will force the entire font to be embedded into the PDF (unless you've used only 2 glyphs in the entire document!). These fonts have small file sizes often under 100k, so there won't be a lot of code bloat ending up in the PDF.
Many OTF fonts fall into this size range, too, such as Adobe Caslon Pro (367 glyphs, 164k).
But if a multi-language Unicode OTF font is used, such as . Arial Unicode (38,895 glyphs, 22 MB) Adobe Kozuka Gothic (9,957 glyphs, 3.31 MB) or Adobe Song Std (40,272 glyphs, 14.8 MB)
.. Then a several thousand extra characters and megabytes of font data are embedded into the PDF. If the PDF is in just one language, such as English, why would I need to embed the font data of Cyrillic, Lao, Arabic, Mandarin, etc.?
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Mar 19
Valter Viglietti - Frame Studio Re: Subsetting fonts conundrum
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