Ask MagCloud: Upload & Publish

What does it mean if my PDF upload failed because "PDF contains non-embedded fonts"?

MagCloud PDFs must have all fonts embedded to ensure that our digital presses are able to reproduce them correctly in print. For information on how to embed the fonts used in your document from a variety of programs, please see the step-by-step instructions available for download on our PDF Design Resources page.

If you believe you have correctly set your fonts to embed and are still receiving this error, it's possible that the non-embedded font occurs in an empty, hidden, or transparent text frame in your document, or that a single character within a text block uses a different font than the rest of the paragraph. Deleting text frames that are empty or hidden, and correcting those where a single character is a different font should eliminate the embedded font error message you are receiving.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, the preflight function can find these for you. Go to Advanced > Preflight > PDF Analysis, and choose the report called "List text using non-embedded fonts." This will list any instances of text that includes non-embedded fonts.

If you created the file in Adobe InDesign, before exporting the PDF go into Type > Find Font, select the non-embedded font's name, and click Find First and Find Next until one of the above mentioned cases has been found on the page mentioned in the error message. This method takes longer, but should eliminate this upload message if the offending text is found and corrected.