A project that I am working on uses non-standard fonts in the documents (in this case Myriad Pro). The documents are in Microsoft Word and then saved as PDFs for distribution. After sending out one document I got feedback that users on Apple computers did not see any text when they opened the PDF with Preview. That’s bad!

I looked around for a solution and found that Preview does not work well with Open Type fonts. The solution (at least until Apple fixes their OS) is to embed the fonts in the PDF.

If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can use this procedure to setup PDF creation:
1.    You must have Adobe Acrobat installed (not just Adobe Reader)
2.    Open the Word file

3.    Select the Acrobat menu
4.    Click Preferences
5.    Click the Settings tab
6.    Click Advanced settings…
7.    Click on Fonts
8.    There is a list of fonts under “Font Source”. Scroll down to MyriadPro and select all of the MyriadPro fonts.
9.    Click on the Add button next to the Always Embed.
10.    Click OK.
11.    It prompts you to save your settings for future use. Give the settings a name and save them.
12.    Click OK.
13.    Now you can use Create PDF in the Acrobat window to generate a PDF that has the MyriadPro fonts embedded in it.

Once this is all setup, you can use this procedure to create the PDF:
1. Open the Word file
2. Select Acrobat > Preferences
3. Check that the saved settings created in the previous procedure are selected
4. Click OK
5. Select Acrobat > Create PDF
6. Select Options…
7. Check the desired options, such as create bookmarks and then save.

Using these procedures you get a PDF with the fonts embedded which fixes the Preview problem on Apple computers.