MicroStrategy ONE

Embedding fonts in PDFs

Embedding fonts ensures that the original fonts selected in the Document Editor are used to display and print the PDF, even on machines that do not have the original fonts installed. No font substitutions are made.

Embedding fonts allows you to:

  • Use language fonts other than Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, and Western European in PDFs

  • Provide a true unicode environment, where one document contains different languages

    Font embedding is not required if the only languages used are Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and the matching language fonts are used instead of a unicode font.

  • Create PDFs containing Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters for any machine, even one without the corresponding Acrobat Reader language pack

    Acrobat Reader cannot display bookmarks in the correct language font, unless the corresponding language pack is installed on the user's machine. The remainder of the PDF displays and prints correctly. This Reader requirement applies to all languages other than English and Western European.

  • Create truly portable PDFs to e-mail and to publish in MicroStrategy Web, even if you do not have control over the machines that will display and print the PDFs

    For a MicroStrategy Web user to be able to view the embedded fonts, the fonts must be installed on the Intelligence Server machine. For a MicroStrategy Developer user to be able to view the embedded fonts, the fonts must be installed on the MicroStrategy Developer machine as well as the Intelligence Server machine.

The disadvantages of embedding fonts include:

  • A larger PDF, because the file now includes extra font data and encoding tables. Additionally, even single-byte languages use two bytes.

  • A longer generation time for the PDF, since the file is larger and extra processing is needed to embed the fonts.

  • A larger memory footprint related to the number of fonts, the number of embedded characters, and the size of the PDF output.

Fonts must be installed on the MicroStrategy Developer machine to ensure that the document is rendered correctly when creating and editing the document. The Embed fonts in PDF setting ensures that if the fonts used in the document are available on the machine that generates the PDF, the fonts are embedded in the PDF. When you execute a document in MicroStrategy Developer, the PDF is generated by that client machine. When you execute a document in MicroStrategy Web, the PDF is generated by the Intelligence Server machine.

If you edit a document containing embedded fonts on a machine that does not have those fonts installed, a Windows default font is displayed instead. For example, this scenario can occur when you create a document and embed fonts for Japanese. In this case, the Japanese fonts are installed on that machine and the Intelligence Server used for the project. Another user views the document on a different machine that does not have Japanese fonts. The document displays correctly because you embedded the fonts. If that user edits the document, the Japanese characters are displayed in the font that Windows selects as the closest match to the missing font. If this occurs, do not change the font selections, which are set to blank automatically, so that they will continue to display correctly in the PDF.

The solution is to install the font on any machine that is used to edit the document.

Prerequisite

The fonts must be installed on the MicroStrategy Developer or Intelligence Server machine to ensure that the document is rendered correctly when creating and editing the document, as described above.

To embed fonts in a PDF

This procedure affects the entire document, including all layouts of a multi-layout document. For more information on multi-layout documents, including which properties apply to the document as a whole or to individual layouts, see Creating multi-layout documents.

  1. Open the document in the Document Editor. (How?)

  2. From the Format menu, select Document Properties. The Document Properties dialog box opens.

  3. Click Export.

  4. In the PDF area, select the Embed fonts in PDF check box.

  5. Click OK to return to the document.

When you generate the PDF, by clicking PDF View on the toolbar, the fonts are embedded in the PDF.

You can also use the Property List to set this property. Choose Document in the drop-down list at the top of the Property List pane, then set Embed fonts in PDF to True.

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