question on PDFs and needing a font loaded

[joefixit2]

Okay, maybe one of you IT people can explain this to me. With my job, I review contracts all the time and sometimes they come in PDF format. I am running Linux (specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and use Firefox and Open Office. Sometimes I will get a PDF contract and when I open it up, most of the pages are blank. There will be some words on the page but most of it is just blank. My system tells me that there are fonts on the page that are not loaded so they can not show them. Isn't a PDF just an image? Why would my system need to have a font loaded to recognize an image when it is not actually typed letters?

[Vince-Vell]

Not all PDFs are embeded fonts.

Im not sure about linux, but mostly OSX and Windows have basic screen fonts shared with both systems. So if these pdfs being made prob are using those fonts which linux may not have.

Or it could be that you dont have acrobat reader installed which may give you those basic fonts. If you installed acrobat reader and still getting issues, it may be linux.

only thing i could think of.

When i make PDFs out of Quark, it embeds all fonts but the PDFs are big. When i make them out of Illustrator i outline all fonts so its a image/vector.

[joefixit2]

How about that. Thanks for the info!