Saving as PDF: fonts look crappy?

I have a small test .psd image with just one piece of text. When I save this as .pdf from Photoshop CS4 (using Save As and choose Photoshop PDF format) and open the .pdf with Acrobat 9, the font looks pretty messed up. Here's an example of what I mean:
http://i26.tinypic.com/5flp2p.jpg
I have attached the example .psd (and saved .pdf) here.
Now the strange thing is: it doesn't happen *always*, sometimes the PDF looks all right. I can't seem to detect what it depends on. I have plenty of available RAM and harddisk space, that's for sure. It seems to occur especially when I already have another PDF open in Acrobat as well. For example, if I copy the test.pdf from above zip to test2.pdf, then open one in Acrobat, then the other, the first may look all right (not always) and the 2nd usually looks messed up.
What's going on? I'm not sure if this is a problem with Acrobat rather than PS, but it happens ONLY with PDFs I save from PS. Never with PDFs from any other source.
Thanks in advance if someone can clear this up!

Font embedding rules, for sure. If a font is considered "locked" and thus un-embeddable, any program is required to convert it to contours as per the PDF language ruels. By keeping a document open under the same name you may just trigger that weird behavior and PS is just not good at it. On the other hand, you could just use a wrong PDF preset and it flattens things to a low quality. As a third possibility, PS could jsut embed the font name reference and then for some inconceivable reason it doesn't get associated in Acrobat. Hard to tell. I'm just not in the mood to do any deeper investigation after a hot, long day full of work, so maybe someone else has a better answer for you...
Mylenium

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Saving as PDF -- Font not showing up

I'm running Illustrator CS2 on a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, OSX 10.4.11. When I save my file as PDF, some of the type is not showing up in certain areas in the resulting PDF. Font is Helvetica Neue 67 Med Condensed. Odd thing is that the same font and weight is showing up in some spots but not others. Type is painted white against a dark blue background.
I have tried copying the text and making a PDF with just the text and it works fine.
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I've tried turning type to outline and still type does not show in resulting PDF.
I've tried turning type to outline, saving as EPS and running thru Distiller. Still type does not show up.
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You’re welcome. Illustrator won’t let you overprint process white. But if something was a different colour and is then changed to white, any overprint attributes remain. There is no warning except for a subtle icon in the Attributes panel, which, of course, must be visible to help. Years of griping at Adobe have done nothing, because Adobe have no interest in making Illustrator a better program, just in making it a bigger program with more wonderful “features” they can use to trick you into upgrading. Customer service, intuitive software, documentation, support, and even basic product testing are alien to Adobe.
The cause of this is most often black text and logos that are expected to be used for placement in many different circumstances. The designer of the original will add the Overprint attribute to the black objects because the art may be used over other colours. When someone opens the file, then changes the colour to white, they get the problem you had.

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I have been working in Excel and been saving PDF files for the past year using the inbuilt feature in Excel. I have recently installed Adobe Acrobat so that I could save PDFs directly from Excel instead. When I save exactly the same file from Excel, the adobe acrobat PDF looks different to the excel PDF version.
I have uploaded an image to show you what I mean.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=1z1ux6d&s=8
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I checked the properties of each file. The Excel PDF version has more fonts listed in the properties section compared to the PDF maker one. I can select the "Date" and "description" and copy and paste it as text but now it appears the text is fine, its showing correctly now even though I havent changed anything.
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I have also attached another image of a close up of the little card icons:
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=nqac9j&s=8
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In terms of the fonts contained in the PDF itself, yes, I am indeed getting different PDF files depending on whether I download them on a Windows PC or on a Mac running OS X.
Yes, I can copy the PDF to the Mac (running OS X), which was originally downloaded on the PC (and looks fine on the PC). And when I view that PDF (again, the one originally downloaded on the PC) in OS X, it looks fine. And if I take the same PDF which was downloaded originally on OS X and then display it on the PC, I can see the font problems on the PC. So the ticket to success, sadly, is that I have to use a PC to download some PDFs or suffer font problems.
For example, I have two versions of the same PDF saved on my Intel iMac. I downloaded both from TurboTax Online, but one was downloaded on the PC and the other on my Mac. The one that was downloaded on the PC looks great and prints great (and is the one I printed and submitted to the IRS). Opening both in Acrobat 9 (on the Mac), I then go to the File menu and choose "Properties" and then view the "Fonts Used in this Document."
The PDF that was generated on the PC (the one that looks perfect) uses 7 fonts (all marked with a red, lower case "a" graphic to the left of them in Acrobat):
Courier
Helvetica
Helvetica-Bold
Helvetica-BoldOblique
Helvetica-Narrow
Helvetica-Narrow-Bold
Helvetica-Oblique
QuickTypePi (Embedded)
But the other PDF, which I downloaded in OS X (the one that has messed up lowercase r's), uses the following 29 fonts (yes, some do look like duplicates, but this is exactly how they show in Acrobat 9):
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Courier (Embedded Subset)
Courier (Embedded Subset)
Helvetica (Embedded Subset)
Helvetica (Embedded Subset)
Helvetica-Bold (Embedded Subset)
Helvetica-Bold (Embedded Subset)
(And these have a red, lower case "a" graphic to the left of them in Acrobat)
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Helvetica-Oblique
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HelveticaLTMM1000134 (Embedded Subset)
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HelveticaLTMM134867 (Embedded Subset)
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To simply say "the font producer" is at fault does not give a technical explanation on why this is happening. And it is not like TurboTax is a small company other. Also, I get similar problems when downloaded some US government PDFs, so it's hard for me to see how the "producer" is at fault here. Something is screwy in the Mac OS, hence my post here to find out what is at fault, and then get it fixed (if possible).
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Saving as PDF: fonts look crappy?

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