Font encoding in Adobe Indesign

March 29, 2006 10:01 PM

PDFfilter: Font encoding in Adobe Indesign

When I export a PDF in Adobe Indesign CS2, it encodes a line of text in Identity-H format if that line contains a special character, such as a ligature or ellipsis. Otherwise, the line is encoded in ANSI. Apparently, these lines print differently (the printer is lulu.com). To fix this, I tried distilling the PDF instead of exporting - this causes some lines to have "Roman" encoding, and the rest are still in ANSI. Is Roman encoding better than Identity-H? And is there a way to force Indesign or Distiller to use the same encoding for all lines?

posted by crack to computers & internet (2 comments total)

From what I've been able to figure out after a quick Googling...
If you can save the PDF as PDF v1.2, you should be okay.
Identity-H (from what I can tell) is a standard encoding as of PDF v1.3. The problem you can run into is when you use a printer that utilizes a custom RIP that does not fully support PDF 1.3 or higher.
THis all has to do with encoding different type formats (type1, OpenType, TrueType) and lookes to be wayyyy too arcane for me.
Search around the forums at PlanetPDF.com and you can be just as perplexed as I am. L
posted by Thorzdad at 5:11 AM on March 30, 2006

Did you look through the forums at LuLu? There are a few posts regarding this very issue. Frankly, from the responses, it doesn't sound like the folks at LuLu have their shit quite together. They seem to blame the person submitting the PDF for the problems when it would appear to be that LuLu (and their sub-contractor) aren't fully supporting current PDF and font standards.

To answer your previous question, I would assume that Roman encoding would be fine. It's an ages-old standard. Again, it really depends on who's running the RIP and what settings they've standardized on.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:18 AM on March 30, 2006