| name | embed-fonts |
| description | Force-embed all fonts in a PDF — fixes the most common cause of "looks fine on screen, wrong on the printer" issues. If the printer doesn't have the font, it substitutes a fallback and layout breaks. Triggers on phrases like "embed fonts", "fix font issues", "fonts looking wrong on print". |
Embed All Fonts
Re-process a PDF so every font used is fully embedded.
Why it matters
Non-embedded fonts trigger printer-side substitution. Common substitutions (Arial → Helvetica → Liberation Sans) cause subtle width changes that ripple into reflowed lines, broken tables, and shifted page breaks.
Inputs
- Input PDF path (required).
- Output path (optional) — defaults to
<input>-embedded.pdf.
Diagnosis (pre-check)
pdffonts input.pdf
Look at the emb and sub columns:
yes yes — fully embedded subset (fine).yes no — fully embedded full font (fine).no no — NOT embedded (problem).
Tooling
Ghostscript with -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true re-runs the PDF through pdfwrite and embeds whatever it can find on the system.
Recipe
gs -o output.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
-dEmbedAllFonts=true \
-dSubsetFonts=true \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
-dNOPAUSE -dBATCH \
input.pdf
/prepress preset includes high-quality embedding settings.
Verification
pdffonts output.pdf
Every row should show emb=yes. If any are still no, the font isn't installed on the system — install via fc-list / apt install, then re-run.
Caveats
- If the source PDF references a font that isn't installed locally and isn't embedded, gs cannot embed it and will substitute. The output will still print "consistently" but with the substitution baked in — verify visually.
- Some commercial fonts have embedding restrictions in their license; gs respects flags. If embedding is denied, gs warns.
Output
Font-embedded PDF.
