CorelDRAW Unleashed Font Substitution Update

If you read the Letters to the Editor in the April/May issue of CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine, you know that some readers are having a problem seeing the correct font when reading the magazine. Thanks to the letter appearing in the magazine, several readers have written me with suggestions. We still don't have a complete answer for the problem, but we've certainly discovered why it happens for some users.

The main font used for body text of the magazine is Georgia. It is a font supplied with most all recent versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and more. So, it is a font that most users should have on their systems.

Where things get strange is when users don't have Georgia on their systems. Those are the users who are having the weird font substitution problems. This shouldn't matter as the Georgia font is supposed to be embedded into the magazine. I had a long talk with the fine folks at Ascender Corporation, who created the Georgia font, and we discovered that a weird conversion problem was causing only the regular weight of Georgia to not embed into the PDF properly.

We will create a new PDF of the April issue that solves this problem, though it may be a few days before it is available for download. In the meantime, there are several ways to read the magazine without having this problem. First, make sure you have the Georgia font installed and that Advanced | Use Local Fonts is checked in Adobe Reader. Second, use FoxIt Reader to read the magazine as it substitutes a font that is much more readable for Georgia.

Now for the solution that we'll have to implement when we re-publish the issue. It seems the problem is a fairly obscure setting in Corel products. No, Corel didn't do anything wrong, it is just a setting that needs to be changed to avoid this issue. On the Objects tab of the Publish to PDF Settings dialog box, the default setting is to Convert TrueType to Type 1 fonts. Georgia is a TrueType font. When this setting is unchecked, the problem goes away.

You can't believe how glad I am to discover the solution to this problem. It took discussions with experts in a wide variety of software to stumble upon the problem. While many users would have called this a bug, it was truly user error all along.