Reply To: Formmagic 2.0.2 – pc and mac font embedding

[~~Ariel~~Participant]

Hi Katherine,

Thanks for the question.
I’ve looked into this more carefully than I had before, and the answer is as follows.
A font file has something called “embedding permission”. This can be set to 1 of 4 levels:
1. No Embedding
2. Print and Preview
3. Editable
4. Installable

“Installable” is the most permissive level.
For FormMagic to successfully embed the font in the PDF, it’s embedding permission has to be either “3. Editable” or “4. Installable”.
The handwriting font you’re trying to use has the most restrictive setting applied to it: “No Embedding”, as can be seen from the screenshot. This is a bit weird, seeing as it’s a freely available font, so I’m not sure why they’d do that.

There are several ways to see what the embeddability status of a font is. You can:
(1) Right-click the font file, choose properties, selecte the Details tab, and see the status there. (Window only, I think).
(2) You can try actually selecting the font in Acrobat: Select a text field, double-click it to open the Properties window in Acrobat, and select the font you’d like to choose. If the font cannot be embedded, a warning will be displayed. (See screenshot.)
(3) After running FormMagic, in the Document Properties in Acrobat, under the Fonts tab, there appears a list of all fonts in the PDF. Next to the font name should appear “Embedded” or “Embedded subset”. If nothing appears after the font name, the font has not and cannot be embedded.

In your case, where you have to use a specific font, I think you will need to provide the font with the PDF, or else ask the font owner if they can change the embeddability setting of that font, or else use a different font.

I would note that out of the 334 fonts I have installed on my system (including Microsoft, Adobe, Monotype and other foundry fonts), 313 all have the permissions level set to “Editable” or “Installable” meaning that they can be embedded, and only some 20 have a more restrictive setting. This matches my experience, which is that most fonts can be embedded. So it’s unfortunate that the one you need to use cannot!

For more info, see here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2015/07/06/document-font-embedding-demystified/

Ariel