Fonts in PDF files: How do I ensure that a font will render properly across platforms/readers?

I created a document in MS Word (2007) and then published to PDF with the intention of creating a document that looks the same regardless of platform or pdf reader choice.

It looks fine on a couple of windows machines, but when I open it in ubuntu (using acroread) the original font, arial, gets replaced with some ridiculous frilly font that is totally inappropriate.

This has me worried that this document might have its font rendered in some crazy random way depending on whatever the recipient is using to open it.

Questions:

1. I don't understand how fonts work in pdf but I've heard about "embedding" fonts in the pdf. Does this ensure that whatever font I choose will be rendered the same way always? If so, how do I do it?

2. Is there an alternative sure-fire way to generate a simple pdf whose fonts "behave" properly? I'm not tied to any particular tool like MS Word. My paramount concern is that the pdf document looks the way I intend it to look.

Solution 1:

1. Yes embedding fonts ensures that all recipients will be able to display the PDF as intended. You have to make sure you have the right to embed a commercial font, there are lesser restrictions for embedding subset fonts. See this article for some idea of the options in Word 2007.

2. Restricting your document to the PDF base fonts should help. There is another set of fonts known as the web-safe fonts that appear on most platforms and ought to be safe to use in PDFs too.

Solution 2:

Since you do not require MS Word -- how about using OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice?

Both these have a menu item 'File -> Export as PDF...'.

Make sure you activate the checkbox PDF/A-1a -- this will guarantee compliance with the PDF/A-1a standard which requires all fonts to be embedded. This way the files display and print the same across all platforms (The 'A' in PDF/A means the file meets the 'archiving' standard.)