Why is InDesign CS converting fonts into CID?
I know that weird stuff happened with fonts when you exported pages intto pdf:s in InDesign 2, and that the only proper way to get printable pdf:s was to print ps:es and distill them. When the cs version came, I was told that the problems were gone and that InDesign cs actally does everything ps+distiller did. However, when I analyze all possible problems with pdf:s created with cs in Acrobat, it still says that fonts are cdi type 0. Why? What are cdi fonts anyway?
Jesper
10.Jun.2005 10.25am
Sorry, i pasted “CDI” all aver the message. That should of course be “CID”
10.Jun.2005 1.02pm
That’s what InDesign does — Go to
http://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/cid.pdf
for a discription of CID fonts.
Bear in mind that some printers (book printers, not laser printers) refuse to take PDF files that have mixed CID and “non-CID” Type 1 fonts. They report that characters drop out, & we’ve seen it happen. Whether this is a problem due to a non-Adobe RIP or an older RIP, I don’t know.
11.Jun.2005 7.25am
CID’s (also called ’double byte fonts’) are used by InDesign to facilitate the use of another-language-typesets. They are supported by PostScript since 1999.
Due to a bug in older versions of InDesign even typefaces with only Western-encoding were converted to CID’s during the PDF-ing process. This has been remedied in the last version of InDesign (CS2 or 4.0).
Mind: All up-to-date RIPs should not have any problem processing CID’s. It is known that some of the third-part ones do, eg Harlequin (upto the last update, I guess).
Using Distiller on a PS-dump removes some of the CID-encoding (mostly that on those Western-encoding fonts), but possibly not all of it, depending on the kind of font(s) you are using.
Beste way to ascertain a problem-free work flow is to use up-to-date RIP’s, preferably one with the real Adobe’flavour’...