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Sunday, June 3, 2018

Save as PDF vs. print Adobe PDF (MS Word)

I've wondered some times what was the difference between the two and today I found an important one.

Let's say you are working with a document in Word that you plan to convert to PDF. You're using a font that you want to embed in that PDF because it's a particular font and probably isn't installed in the target user computer.

  • If you 'Save as PDF', by default the font is 'embedded' by converting the letters to bitmap so it's a fail. This usually happens when the font isn't a 'common' one. Obviously, you won't be able to copy from this generated PDF.
  • If you print with 'Adobe PDF' virtual printer, the font is embedded properly and letters are vectorized.

So now, you know. If you're using weird special fonts, don't forget to print as PDF.