Fonts Change When Converting Word To PDF – Save As PDF [Solved]

When I save a document  as a PDF from Word, the fonts change, in some cases, quite badly. You will see posts about embedding fonts to fix it etc, but what I found was, there is another reason.

Basically Word works like this:

  1. You want me to save the document as a PDF?
  2. Excellent choice sir!
  3. Let see, what is your default printer
  4. Hmm is is a generic text label printer
  5. Oh dear , not many fonts this printer supports , in fact you have only 1
  6. Well…… I will do my best sir as I do not want to disappoint you
  7. Lets See… Ok, right what i will do is  translate all the 23 fonts you have in your document, to the 1 font the default printer can produce!

Ok that is an extreme example, but you get the idea – whatever default printer you have selected, the save as PDF function in word will use the fonts the default printer will support

In my case it was a label printer that was sent as the default printer and the driver was text/generic.

This severely limited font choice . Changing the default printer it to a PCL5 or postscript printer solved the problem.

 

 

 

 

 

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