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Quart PDF to Illustrator Problems
Greetings,
My wife is a graphic designer and after installing CS5 she has had problems opening Quark PDF’s in Illustrator. She had an old Powermac G5 with CS2 and the process of saving a Quark file as a PDF and opening it in Illustrator seemed pretty straight forward, but with the new version of CS5, it isn’t so straight forward. I was hoping somebody may be able to shed some light on the situation. Instead of the PDF opening in Illustrator and the font coming out as it should… the font appears as boxes with an x through it.(please see screen shot attached) Fontagent Pro is the font manager that she is using, and the font shows up as a recognizable font in Illustrator, so not sure what the problem is? I checked the Quark and the Adobe websites to see if there were any conflicts or work around and I could not find any. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated….Maybe there is a new workflow that would solve the problem?
Screen Shot
1284_screenshot20101115at10.56.35pm.png.zipThanks in advance
Jason -
10 Replies
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BTW… The subject should be Quark PDF to Illustrator Problems
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In Acrobat, under File > Properties, you can check the embedded fonts. Just curious if all fonts are embedded OK?
Won’t you upload an actual PDF that’s giving you problems so we can have a look.
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Sorry…….I didn’t even think about uploading the actual pdf. I will upload tonight when I get home from work.
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I actually had a copy of one of the pdf’s we were having problems with..
Here is the link, thank you for your time. -
Well, it seems the solution is easy and I can tell you two different ones.
The first one is, that you have to install the missing fonts in your system. The fonts are embedded into the PDF document, so you can see it correctly in Acrobat. However, if you want to open the PDF in a program where you can edit the font, you have to have the fonts installed in your system (Copperplate-Light, Eccentric, MontereyBT-Regular).
The other solution is, and this is if you don’t have the missing fonts at your disposal, is to export the PDF from Acrobat as an EPS file. This will outline the fonts and you’ll have them as vector, so you can open it no prollem in AI. However, since the fonts will become vector outlines, you won’t be able to edit them. Unless you use a different font and re-type the copy.
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That is what is so crazy… I’m 99% sure the fonts are installed on the system, because my wife designed the invitations in Photoshop on the same system.
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Well, you have to be 100% sure. 99 is not enough. Look and see. Test. Type in something and verify that they are indeed the same fonts.
There are fonts that are similar sounding in name, not to mention perfect look alikes (maybe just a very small difference in look) but they are made/designed by a different manufacturer.
So you might need to open up the font file and see if the font is actually from the same manufacturer. As an example, I know that there is Futura and Univers available from different manufacturers. Not to mention the fact that at my work another designer is working on a Mac, I work on a PC. So even though we both have Univers installed, the documents are not compatible because the fonts are from a different manufacturer and when we open up the design in InDesign, it doesn’t find the font. Even though by name (Univers) the font is there and it IS Univers.
Another thing is, that Adobe programs sometimes install fonts at startup for a specific app (like Photoshop) and they are removed when the app shuts down. So you might have the font available in PS, but crazy as it might sound, AI might not use or install the same fonts. This used to happen with older versions, not sure how CS5 behaves. Now, I’m just trying to troubleshoot here, so bear in mind the various possibilities.
So that’s why it’s important to make sure that when AI is running, the ACTUAL fonts that were used in the design are installed and available.
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Just to elaborate on this a little more, I just searched for ‘Copperplate Light’ which is one of the missing fonts.
Turns out, there are Copperplate Light from ‘EF’ (Elnser+Flake) and from ‘URW’. They are different makers. So if the design was created using Copperplate Light from EF, but you have Coopperplate Light from URW, it won’t work. You need the SAME font from the SAME maker/manufacturer for it to work.
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I really appreciate all of your help. I will go through your troubleshooting steps, and see if I can get to the bottom of it. I will report back, so maybe it can help somebody else as well.
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The solution is very simple (if you are using a Mac). Open the PDF that you are having problems with using the program that comes with Macs called “Preview” and save it as the same overwriting the old one. Now open the file back on Illustrator and the boxes with the x are gone.
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