LibreOffice won't embed most fonts into PDFs (with fix)
There's more to it than this card says. All we know right now is that sometimes PDFs generated by LibreOffice don't render properly on some machines, with e.g. characters appearing as dots. We don't know if the font is to blame, or LibreOffice, or particular versions of LibreOffice.
- LibreOffice Impress, Writer, etc. doesn't embed most fonts into the PDFs it generates Show archive.org snapshot .
- This means if you share a slide show with a font that is not Arial or Times, other people will get an error message "Cannot extract the embedded font 'XYZ Some characters may not display or print correctly" and unreadable text. Everybody loses.
- Some forums will recommend that you tick "PDF/A-1a" in the PDF options to make LibreOffice embed fonts. In reality, this just rasters everything and creates a big ass PDF full of images.
A workaround
- The only solution is to directly print the PDF to a PDF printer, or take the PDF generated by LibreOffice and reprint it to a PDF printer.
- If you are on Windows, I recommend to reprint to FreePDF Show archive.org snapshot .
- If you are on Linux, your PDF printer sucks. I recommend to fire up Windows XP in a VirtualBox and print to FreePDF Show archive.org snapshot .
- Note that if you are printing a slide show, you will get white margins around the slides. To fix this, set a custom paper format of 28cm × 21cm and landscape orientation in the advanced options of FreePDF (not Adobe Reader, can be accessed from Reader's print dialog).
- Note that all your colors will be fucked up. E.g. black will appear as a dark gray on the reprinted PDF. To fix this, choose "Let printer determine colors" in the advanced print options of Adobe Reader (not FreePDF).
- Note that reprinting the PDF will recompress all the images that were already compressed by LibreOffice, so disable image compression in LibreOffice for serious, high quality printing jobs.