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Re: Do fonts have to be embedded in a WCAG 2.0 conforming PDF document?

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From: _mallory
Date: Apr 16, 2015 12:03PM

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 12:41:00PM +0000, Jonathan Avila wrote:
> > Well, what is the problem that can arise when fonts aren't embedded?
>
> The idea as I understand it is that glyphs can be rendered differently such as enlarged when the font is embedded properly. While many people think non-scanned PDFs are not images they are actually rendered glyphs. I don't know all of the details and I know PDF/UA goes more into this topic -- but it would be good to hear from a PDF Guru as to whether not embedded fonts could impact SC 1.4.4. I'm sure someone could also put together some test files to compare how enlargement and reflow works in these different situations.

My husband had to programmatically pick certain text out of PDFs with
no structure. There were no embedded fonts, just glyphs, but each glyph
was referred to in octal code which pointed to a table of characters in
the set used in the PDF.

So something about the glyph should remain the same whether the letters
are enlarged or changed colour or whatever... but I have no idea if
anything other than a postScript-reading program would be able to access
that data.

_mallory