Arial Font problems in old pdfs! {Pics inside}

Question

Hello all.
Here is the problem as best I can explain it!
I have pdf files that were origanally created on a Mac (I am using Win 7) using Arial Narrow font family.  I read all the issues posted
on the Arial Narrow font problems but none have solved the problem.  Below are screen shots of what I think might be the cause.
When I look at the properties in Acrobat for the pdf in question here is what fonts show up.
The only font that displays correctly is Arial-Black true type font.  The Type1 ArialNarrow displays
as shown in the picture below. One other thing to note:  Notice how ArialNarrow is all one word?
Is that maybe why Illustrator is having a problem with it?  I have tried to find it with no luck.
When opened in Illustrator CS2 this is what is displayed.
The fonts are in my fonts directory both in Windows and Illustrator.  I even loaded the older 2.35
version that is mentioned all over the net.
The problem is that I have hunderds of these documents some with over 200 pages each.  I have messed
with this for several days now and am at a loss as to what to do next.
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated! ! !
Mark

Answer 1

Substituting fonts in Illustrator using Type>Find font is not going to work.
If you look at the screenshots you'll see the fonts are CID fonts with custom encoding. The fonts on Marks Computer probably have ANSI encoding (i.e. standard western character set) and the character maps will not match. As a result you will not get legible text but just squares or other things (diamonds, dots etc.)
Mark sent me a file to look at and below is what I wrote in a direct e-mail to him.
<quote>
The problem is that the PDF was made directly from InDesign, which converts the fonts to CID fonts (normally used for Asian fonts like Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and in doing so it created a character map (encoding) that is not compatible with our regular fonts which use the Western Character set (ANSI encoding). Which explains why replacing the embedded font with one on your system doesn't work.
There is some info on the Adobe website at the following links:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/329/329611.html
http://indesignsecrets.com/cid-identity-h-fonts-are-back.php
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/324995
<end quote>
The CID charachter problem also exists in Acrobat 7 and 8, but got solved in Acrobat 9.
The only thing that worked to get a PDF with readable and editable text was to use an OCR program (Abby FineReader in my case, but Omnipage can do the same) to process the PDF and in doing so the embedded fonts were basically OCR'ed using system fonts and then saving it again as a PDF had basically the same effect as replacing the embedded fonts by system fonts. After that opening the PDF in Illustrator gave normal text and the file could be edited. Though Serif DrawPlus did a better job in opening the PDF as an editable file.
In this case the OCR route is an option because the PDF file contained a table. If it had been a drawing the OCR option might be less useful depending on how the OCR software would handle the drawing part, unless getting the text out of the PDF and reinsert it into the drawing would be sufficient.
Maybe the above info is of some use for those who are dealing with the same problem.