This page assumes that you are using a version of Adobe's Acrobat to make PDFs. It also assumes that you have read about making PDFs from Acrobat in two steps. If you have not yet read about creating PDFs in two steps, please scan through that first before going on. Also, some of these methods are based on documentation from Adobe and on experimentation on my own systems. Your results may differ. Viewing a PDF or printing it on a desktop printer is no guarantee that it will properly print on Lulu's printer. Always order and proof a copy from Lulu before ordering in quantity or making the file available to the public.
The problem of multiply embedded font subsets
There are several ways that PDFs can end up with one or more of its fonts embedded multiple times. This becomes a problem for printing by Lulu's printer partners because the commercial printing software can become easily confused about which encoding of the font to use. The result is books that print with pages of text garbled or missing entirely.
An ounce of prevention
The most common way for a font to become multiply embedded is by combining two or more PDFs into one larger PDF. The easiest way to avoid multiple embeddings is to prevent it in the first place by making the PDF from a single source file and creating the PDF from that source file.
Combining PDF files with Acrobat 7 Professional
Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro has settings that allow you to combine multiple PDFs and consolidate the font embeddings.
From the Acrobat 7 "File" menu, select Create PDF=>From Muliple Files:
Setlect the files to add from the browse menu:
When all files to be combined are listed, click OK.
Give the combined file a name.
Check under the Advanced menu, PDF Optimizer for compatibility and font embedding settings.
Combining postscript files in distilling a PDF
If you do not have a recent version of Adobe Acrobat, and it is not possible to create a PDF from a single source file, you can still create individual postscript files and then use a method described in Acrobat's Help files to combine those postscript files during distilling. This style seems complicated at first blush, but it is actually quite simple as illustrated here.
The method described in Acrobat's Help uses a version of a small postscript file that you customize by editing it and renaming it. The purpose of the file is to be the master postscript file that lists the various files that you want to combine. After editing to including your files' path and name, you save it with a unique name representing the PDF you will make. (You might call it "book1.ps" for instance.) When you Distill this file it enables Distiller to find the files to combine and when it does, the font embeddings should be optimized.
There are actually two versions of the file included in both Acrobat 5 and 6. Inside the files are comments describing how to edit them. The file called "Runfilex.ps" is edited to include a list of files (including their paths) to be combined. The examples are for Macintosh systems. These listings need to be deleted and replaced with file names and paths appropriate for your specific system. I suggest using the notepad editor to keep the text file as a text file.
Making our postscript files and saving them
We start by making our postscript files by printing to the postscript driver. I'll illustrate this from an OpenOffice version of my fonttest.doc file. As in the tutorial on the 2-step Acrobat method, we uncheck the "do not send fonts" setting:
Then print to the postscript driver, but select the setting to "Print to file" to make a postscript file.
When you select print, you will get a dialog box for choosing where to save the file and what name to give it. I choose the Desktop as the place to save and then select "all" as the file type to get my .ps file extension to be saved instead of the default .PRN extension:
Next, I create my second file, naming it fontest2.ps, also saving it to the Desktop, making it easy to find.
I want to put these files into a folder with an easy path to write down. So I create a folder in C:\. I start by opening "MyComputer," selecting C:\ , and then clicking on FILE and New and Folder.
I rename that folder "postscript".
Now, to make the moving of files around easier, I make a shortcut to that file that I put on the desktop. Right-button click on the postscript folder in C:\, and drag it with that right button held down to a space on the Desktop.
Select the option "Create Shortcut Here" to have this folder be a shortcut. We do not want a copy and we do not want to move the folder to the Desktop.
Once you've got a shortcut on the Desktop, you can move your postscript files for converting to it. When making files and saving them, keep the names simple, save them to the Desktop, and then move them to your "postscript" shortcut for converting.
Editing RUNFILEX.PS for our files:
Now we find the Acrobat file that permits us to combine multiple postscript files. I did a "find files" and found RUNFILEX.PS in a folder called XTRAS among the Acrobat Distiller folders. I copy it to the desktop:
Now I rename the runfilex.ps file to something like "book1.ps" since it is going to be the name of my combined PDF after I finish distilling:
Open the file in a text editor like the Notepad editor:
The instructions are inside the file. It comes with a set of example file paths for doing this in a Macintosh. I select and delete those.
Add the paths to my postscript folder that I created in the earlier steps. It is in C:\, but the instructions are to use a forward slash, "/" instead of a backslash "\" for the purposes of this postscript program:
At this point, our two postscript files should be in the folder in C:\postscript. That folder will have a shortcut on the Desktop making it easy to move files into it and delete files from it. You should also have a postscript file on your desktop that has the paths and filenames entered into it as illustrated above and as described in the file's comments.
You are ready to distill the postscript file. I open Distiller to confirm my settings (see the Acrobat Two-step tutorial). Then I drag the BOOK1.PS icon to Distiller:
When we look at the PDF in Adobe Reader and select "Document Properties" we can see that all of the fonts are embedded and only embedded one time each:
Or....Combine PDFs with Acrobat and redistill
An alternative method that is not recommended by Adobe is to redistill a PDF that has multiple embeddings of an individual font. However, for PDFs created on your own system, in which Distiller has access to all the same fonts, it may be an easy solution. If your document has images, you should find Distiller settings to prevent it from compressing the image files a second time because that will degrade those images.