Should you convert/outline live text fonts in your InDesign document? Usually not, except sometimes, yes. What should you know?
Many are told that they have to outline the text fonts when making PDFs to send to the commercial printer. This means converting live typeface font info into dead vector outlines of shapes of letters. Is it necessary to outline the fonts? Many are under the impression that if you don’t, and the person receiving the PDF doesn’t have the particular font on their computer, it will default to a different font in the PDF. Not true.
Outlining fonts is largely an urban myth of print publishing. The truth is that you should rarely have to outline fonts. This myth is perpetuated by some in the print industry who won’t accept a PDF file unless the fonts have been outlined. This originates from the early years of software when font standards differences and raster-image-processors were new and incomplete. Adobe maintains that the need to outline text stems from buggy clone PostScript implementations dating from 20-30 years ago.
Adobe not only produces content creation, layout, and editing software, but also provides RIP software used for Adobe PostScript and native PDF rendering (for example, the Adobe PDF Print Engine v7, May 2025). A PDF print engine is built into InDesign. Nowadays, that means that your PDF exported from InDesign will print.
Adobe says if you can open a PDF file in Adobe Pro or Acrobat Reader and page through the PDF file and all pages render correctly on the screen, the likelihood of problems when printing is exceptionally low. Similarly, if the file is viewed via a soft-proofer (a screen-based proofer) based on the printer’s raster image processor (RIP) called a digital front end (DFE) and no anomalies appear, then that likelihood of problem is near 0%.
Adobe InDesign always embeds fonts in the PDF if the font vendor’s EULA (end user license agreement) says you can. Nearly all fonts do allow this. Generally, the rare font that forbids embedding in a PDF will also have a EULA that expressly forbids converting to outlines. Why even use a font like that?
Reasons to NOT outline text:
The outlining of text will degrade the typographic quality of the text. The glyphs are turned into normal vector shapes which lack the intelligence that fonts have in displaying or printing. They lose their side bearing distances, causing them to shift a little. Many times the text appears slightly bolder or fatter than before. Fonts also lose an adjustability called hinting when you convert live type to outlines of letterform shapes. Hinting renders letters differently based on different output resolutions.
Many attributes will be lost when outlining because they are not part of the font itself, but are supplied by InDesign. These include attributes like underlining, strikethrough, bullets applied with the Bullets and Numbering feature, and footnotes. If you select the text and choose Type > Create Outlines, all those attributes disappear.
You greatly increase the file size when you outline fonts. Coupled together with that, rendering time (RIP time for printing) can increase because outlined text isn't cached as glyph definitions.
In the case of PDF, you lose the ability to search for text and do any text editing in Acrobat Pro. You also lose accessibility for screen readers and the ability to export to other text-based formats.
Almost always, the best answer is to use fonts which allow embedding, and let InDesign embed the fonts (it does this by default) when you export a PDF file. The resulting PDF file can be viewed in Acrobat Pro or free Adobe Acrobat Reader on either macOS or Windows, or printed to any printer with the fonts behaving reliably well without anyone’s intervention.
Illustrator as a PDF editor?
When encountering printing issues, the most common single cause of problems is the opening and fixing of PDF files by prepress operators using Adobe Illustrator.
This is problematic because Adobe Illustrator is not a general-purpose PDF file editor. The only PDF files that can be safely opened in Adobe Illustrator are PDF files saved from Illustrator with the Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities and/or the Create PDF Compatible File and/or the Embed Permitted Fonts editability enabled (an option that is not available with any PDF/X file) and if all the fonts used in the PDF file are actually installed on the system.
Otherwise, you can experience font substitutions, text spacing changes, unexpected color space changes/conversions, modified content, and lost content (especially if the original Illustrator had content placed via links). This is because Adobe Illustrator doesn't support the full PDF specification, only the subset of PDF needed to represent Illustrator objects.
On the other hand, using Adobe Illustrator to open and edit really simple PDF artwork files might not show or trigger any problems. Only careful inspection will tell if any subtle changes have occurred, and these will likely involve text in the artboard page.
The second most common cause of problems are fixups made by automated PDF workflow products that some vendors convince prepress operators to use. Most are simply unnecessary these days.
You shouldn’t allow a print service provider to fix mistakes in your press-ready PDF/X files. If a print service provider believes there is a mistake with your files, have them contact you. The originator of the PDF prepress file should be the one to make fixes, sending back an adjusted PDF to the commercial printer.
So the next time someone says that you need to outline your fonts, this information can help you evaluate whether to say yes or no.
A few good reasons to outline text
Finished company logo files that are shared with the public customarily have all the text converted to outlines so that the design cannot be accidentally changed by substituting a different typeface.
You would convert to outlines if you want to manually reshape the glyph shapes for a special artistic effect by means of the Pen tool family of vector drawing tools. For example, you are drawing an exaggerated descender as a flourish of a letterform in a logo design.
Some company’s workflows may have issues with fonts in PDF’s even though they are generated using the standard PDF recipe of PDF/X1a. Some specialized workflows like vinyl cutting or milling cutters/plotters only understand vector shapes. The same might be true of some specialty fabric sewing machine workflows.
If you clearly know you need outlines, convert the exported PDF in Acrobat > Print Production > Preflight (and search for a fixup named “Convert fonts to outlines”) but never outline text in the InDesign document itself. Doing it with this Acrobat Pro fixup method generally produces reliable results.
