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I assume that you are specifically referring to the forms posted by
the United States Internal Revenue Service on <ftp://ftp.irs.gov>.
For the most part and generally speaking, these forms only have special
symbol fonts embedded and NOT the fonts used for their text. If you
use Acrobat to open such PDF files, you can look at which fonts are
used and of those, which are embedded, and what is used to substitute
for those that aren't embedded. (Acrobat 6 does a much better job than
earlier versions of Acrobat in terms of letting you immediately see
the font situation without needing to first "page" through the entire
document!)

In terms of fonts used for "substitution" when displaying or printing,
this depends on (1) version of Acrobat, (2) fonts installed on your system,
(3) "how" you print the PDF file, and (4) what font is not embedded.
PDF files with not all fonts embedded can and will print differently
from different systems and via different print mechanisms.

First of all, I would do ALL printing of the IRS forms from either Acrobat
or Adobe Reader / Acrobat Reader. Secondly, I would look at list of unembedded
fonts for such documents, license copies of same, and install them on the
computer from which the printing is to done. For the most part, you will
probably need the full Helvetica family (four faces), Helvetica Condensed
family, and HelveticaNeue (separate families from plain'ol Helvetica).

I would NOT recommend that you use any alleged "direct PDF print" printers
or RIPs with any PDF file for which any fonts are "missing." Too risky!

        - Dov 






At 7/29/2003 09:08 AM, Matthew Born wrote:

>Hi, 
>We are producing books which frequently involve incorporating PDFs produced by 
>numerous other sources. Many of these are IRS forms which often do not have all the 
>fonts embedded. The substitution fonts appear to work well enough for this purpose as 
>the output on our lasers is certainly good enough. I, in fact, cannot even tell where 
>the substitution fonts might be kicking in, at least on the generic-looking IRS 
>forms. (Note that these are not PDF "dynamic" forms, just forms in the traditional 
>sense). The final PDF we supply to our vendor includes these PDFs, merged with our 
>own carefully made and flightchecked files. However, our print vendor (these are 
>ultimately printed digitally) feels that it is possible that we'd get different 
>output from our "proofing" laserprinters than they will on the final job -- or at 
>least that it could happen. I was under the impression that the output of the 
>substitution fonts would be identical from one postscript printer to the next and 
>thus!
, if it looks OK here, it should look OK when they run the job. Can anyone enlighten 
me on this?
>
>Thanks, 
>Matthew Born 
>American Law Institute 


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