Specifications

PDF2DTP® for InDesign® Manual - 43
PDF2DTP for InDesign - Font Conversion Tips
PDF2DTP for InDesign - Missing Fonts
Missing fonts (fonts which are not active when performing a conversion) pose the biggest problems.
Calculations for text positions are based on information (such as character widths) provided by the PDF
according to the original fonts and therefore text may flow undesirably until the fonts are located and
activated.
PDF2DTP for InDesign - Unknown Character or Glyph
If for some reason a character used in the PDF cannot be converted it will be substituted with a question mark
(“?”). In this case you will need to locate and activate the original font and retry the conversion. For example,
a Type0 font embedded in the PDF contains drawing commands in order to display little “images”, such as a
bar code, but the specific Unicode values may be unknown and it is therefore impossible to obtain the TEXT.
When question marks appear, an interesting test you can perform is to open the PDF in an Editor, such as
Acrobat, and copy and paste the text into a Text Editor to see if “garbage” is displayed. This would be proof
that it is physically impossible to convert the drawing commands into Unicode values (that is to say without
using sophisticated OCR algorithms.)
PDF2DTP for InDesign - Substitute Missing Fonts Enabled
If you turn on the “Substitute Missing Fonts” preference then missing (inactive) fonts will be substituted with the
application’s default font (commonly Minion Pro, Times, Arial or Helvetica, etc.) The actual font will be based
on the “Normal” character style which can be changed manually to a different default replacement font
(usually by editing the style sheet when no documents are open, or by changing the application’s font
substitution preferences). Using the substitute active font may often result in a more desirable text flow,
especially when combined with the “Scale Text” Preference.
Important Note*** - Based on in-house testing, enabling the Scale Text option dramatically increases the time
it takes a conversion to complete. You may want to consider using this option on a range of pages instead of
entire documents, especially if the document is long and has many text styles used in it.
PDF2DTP for InDesign - Substitute Missing Fonts Disabled
When the conversion is complete the application may display a list of missing fonts at which time you can
change them as desired, or you can edit the style sheets at any time in the future.