Fonts not showing up in properties list

Q: I want to set my text annotation to a specific font but it is not listed in the font list. Why?

A: PDF Studio loads only fonts found in the operating system font directories. If they are installed in other directories or locations PDF Studio will not find the font. Make sure that you have properly installed the font on your system by checking the operating system font manager or fonts directory to see if your font is listed.

Windows

  • Open the Fonts manager found by going to Control Panel->Appearance and Personalization->Fonts and make sure your font is listed
  • Check the Windows font directory (C:\Windows\Fonts) for the font file (make sure these are the fonts that are accessible to all users on the machine)
  • Instead of double clicking the file to open it and then clicking the install button, you can right click and choose, “Install for all users”

Mac

  • Open the Fonts manager found by going to Finder->Applications->Fonts and make sure your font is listed
  • Check one of the following directories for the font file
    • ~/Library/Fonts
    • /Library/Fonts
    • /Network/Library/fonts
    • /System/Library/Fonts
    • /System Folder/Fonts
    • /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts

Linux

  • Use a command-line tool and enter the following command “fc-list" to find out currently loaded fonts. The command will list all available fonts, along with additional information about the fonts.
  • Check the Linux font directory (/usr/share/fonts/) for the font file

Unsupported Fonts

If you have completed the above steps and the font is not listed it’s possible that the font file itself contains an error or property that is not currently supported in PDF Studio. Below is a list of potential reasons the font would not be loaded by PDF Studio.

  1. Any font where PDF Studio can’t identify the glyph data format – bitmap fonts & color OpenType fonts.
  2. Any font using PostScript curve data structure (CFF or CFF2) – can’t subset this format (yet).
  3. Any font without a family name
  4. Any font where the family name is prefixed with a “.” character
  5. Any font where permission flags don’t allow embedding or only allow bitmap embedding.
  6. Any font without a name set in the Windows Unicode English format