Sometimes, when you use a custom font in your Microsoft Word or PowerPoint file, you may notice that the font or layout do not appear correctly in Pepper Flow. Or, you may experience issues uploading a PDF due to complexity or overall shape/layout. Here are some workarounds.
- About custom fonts
- Embed your fonts
- Update your company configuration
- Provide your own viewable rendition
- Issues uploading a complex PDF
- Other layout issues
About custom fonts
Some fonts, like Times New Roman and Verdana, are available across systems. However, when you’re designing documents, you may use custom fonts to achieve a specific style.
Custom fonts are not guaranteed to be available on all systems. When they’re not available, they’re replaced with a close match. This is usually what happens when you see a font-related issue in Pepper Flow.
You have a few options, listed below, to help fix that issue.
Embed your fonts
Microsoft Office allows you to embed fonts in your files to ensure others who view the file see it as you intended. The process to embed fonts is simple but may vary depending on your operating system and which version of Microsoft Office you’re using, so see their help documentation for instructions.
Please note that embedded fonts must be in .TTF format. Pepper Flow relies on Microsoft Office to pass the fonts from Microsoft Office to generated PDF files. At this time, Microsoft Office only accepts .TTF font files. File types of .OTF and Type 1 are not supported. You may need to convert .OTF font files to .TTF.
To determine what font types are used in your document:
- Save the file as a PDF
- Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat
- Navigate to File > Document Properties > Fonts
- Each font and the font type will be listed
It's important to note that embedding fonts increases the size of your file, especially if your file uses multiple fonts and weights.
Provide your own viewable rendition
If the font is not available for embedding or embedding does not work for you, you can upload your own viewable rendition of the document. This will allow you to maintain the original file format for the document being routed in Pepper Flow but annotate on a viewable rendition that more closely matches the final document.
- Open your file.
- Select File > Save as.
- Select PDF as the file format and save.
- Navigate back to the document in Pepper Flow.
- Click "Details" in the bottom left.
- Click on the Renditions tab.
- Click “Upload” and select the PDF, PNG, or JPEG rendition of your file.
- Navigate back to the Viewer.
Upload issues with complex PDFs
Occasionally, Pepper Flow may fail to upload a PDF file that meets the file size requirements due to the file’s complexity or overall shape/layout (e.g. PDFs with many layers or pages of varying sizes).
In these cases, we recommend trying these options:
- Compress or flatten the file in Adobe. The Acrobat PDF compression tool balances an optimized file size against the expected quality of images, fonts, and other file content. Flattening the file will remove all layers.
- Ensure pages in the PDF are of a uniform size and layout.
- Break apart particularly long or wide pages into multiple pages. Save each section separately and aggregate them into one PDF using Adobe.
- If you’re still having trouble uploading a PDF, you can upload a simplified version of your file to Pepper Flow first, and then upload your original PDF as a rendition. A simplified version could be an image file (JPEG, PNG) or a zip of the file if you want to maintain the original file.
Other layout issues
- Complex elements: If you have a PDF or Illustrator file with complex vectors and gradients, you may see unexpected shapes and colors when you upload the file to Pepper Flow. Try simplifying the complex elements to avoid those issues. For example, remove some shapes or gradients to reduce complexity, or save complex elements as images before using them in your file.
- Unexpected characters: If you see unexpected characters in the highlighted text pulled into an annotation, that may be a sign that your file is corrupted. In particular, this can happen when you edit a PDF in Preview, the PDF viewer on macOS.
- In other cases, Preview has a tendency to corrupt PDF files, so we recommend making PDF edits in Adobe Acrobat instead.
- If all else fails, there may be an issue with the way the PDF was saved. Try making a minor change, re-saving the file, and re-uploading it into Pepper Flow.
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