Checking your fonts are really embedded
Of all the reasons a print file gets stopped at upload, an unembedded font is the most common — and the one authors are most confident does not apply to them. The file opened perfectly on their own machine, with the font sitting in their own font library. It looked right.
Looking right on the machine that made it is exactly the condition that hides this fault. Preflight: what to check before you upload lists the check among nine others. This guide is about that one line.
What embedding actually means
A PDF can carry a typeface in one of two ways.
It can hold the letterform data itself — the outlines, the widths, the spacing — inside the file. Or it can name the font and trust that whatever machine opens the file later has a copy.
The second is not a broken file. It is a file with a dependency, and on your computer that dependency is satisfied because you installed the font. On a printer's equipment it very often is not — and a renderer asked for a font it does not have does not stop. It substitutes the nearest thing it holds and prints.
Substitution changes more than the look
A different typeface would be bad enough. The real damage goes further.
Every face has its own character widths. A substitute set at the same nominal size runs wider or narrower, so lines break at different words, paragraphs gain or lose a line, and the shift accumulates down the book. Chapter openings land in new places. Blank pages appear where you did not put them.
Then the page count moves — and the page count is the number your spine was computed from. A cover built for 312 pages does not fit a book that came out at 318. One unembedded font in the interior can take the cover down with it. How to calculate spine width covers that arithmetic.
Substitution also drops what the replacement face does not carry. Accented characters and unusual symbols go first, and they go silently. Accents, symbols and characters that go missing covers that failure on its own.
How a file ends up unembedded
Export settings in a word processor. Embedding is frequently an option rather than the default, and sometimes an option that only covers the characters used in the document. If you have never opened that dialog, you do not know how it is set.
A "smallest file size" preset. These exist to make a file small enough to email. Reducing size means dropping what can be dropped, and font data is large and droppable. A preset for attachments is not a preset for print.
A font whose license forbids embedding. Fonts carry permission settings, and some free, demo and personal-use faces are marked to restrict embedding. A well-behaved export tool honors that mark by leaving the font out or refusing the export. Nothing is broken; the license is doing its job.
A PDF assembled from mixed sources. A title page from a designer, the body from a word processor, a map from a third program, merged into one document. Merging does not repair the pieces. "All fonts embedded" is only true of the whole file if it is true of every page in it.
In the Interior Formatter. It sets your book in one of six licensed body faces and embeds them on every export as a matter of course, with the interior ink set to black only and the final page count kept even. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
How to check, in any reader
Tools change and menus get renamed, so learn the shape of this check rather than a sequence of clicks. Open the finished PDF in a reader that can report document properties. Somewhere in those properties is a font list naming every typeface the document calls for. That list is the answer.
Beside each entry you want one of two words: Embedded, or Embedded Subset. Any font listed without one of them is the problem.
Both are fine. A subset carries only the glyphs the document actually uses and omits the rest of the face — the normal, much smaller result, not a partial job.
Two habits make the check worth doing:
- Read the whole list, not the first line. The usual fault is one entry in twenty — a face that appears on a single page, in a pull quote or a copyright line.
- Check the file you are about to upload. Not the one before the last edit. Re-export, re-check.
If your reader shows no font panel at all, it is a lightweight viewer. Open the file in something that reports document properties.
What to do about one that is not embedded
Re-export with embedding forced on. Usually the font is licensed for embedding and the setting was simply wrong. Turn it on, export again, check again.
Replace the font. If the license is blocking it, no export setting will help. Buy a license that permits embedding, or set the text in a face you already hold one for.
Convert type to outlines, for display only. Turning letters into shapes removes the dependency, which is a fair last resort on a cover. Never on body text: outlined text cannot be searched, selected or read aloud.
After any of these, open the font panel again. Assuming the fix worked is how the same file gets uploaded twice.
Checking ours before you pay for it
Our exports embed the fonts every time, and the interior prints in black ink only.
You do not have to take that on trust. A free preview is a real PDF with a watermark across it, and its font panel reports exactly what the paid file will. Run this check on the preview, before any money changes hands.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Preflight: what to check before you upload · More: Why print files get rejected, and how to not be rejected · Choosing a typeface for the body of a book · Fonts in an ebook, and why yours may not be used