A Tip for James Raggi

I am told by a friend of mine that I would have been better off offering to help Raggi with his font problem than laughing at it. I would be a bigger person or more responsible or whatever. So in an effort to be a bigger person, experience personal growth and transcendence; here you go, James Raggi.

Based on what I have read, it appears that the problem you have is called Font Embedding. I cannot give you specific advice because I don't know what layout program you are using. But whenever you convert your document from the program you are using into a PDF, there should be an option to embed whatever fonts you are using into the document. Most programs automatically embed all fonts and should give you an error notification if they cannot. This is probably why you never had this problem before. For some reason, you didn't get an error notification though (or maybe you did and didn't realize the ramifications).

Fonts are vector drawings, not bitmaps, which means that they are drawn at the time they are viewed based on a series of instructions, rather than beforehand and then "remembered." This is great because it allows you to size the font however you want and then the instructions will hold true no matter what size you use (rather than pixelate as they get stretched or compressed if a bitmap).

The problem is when you don't have permission to pass out the instructions. This occurs most often with specialty fonts, most likely the kind you are using in your game. You will either have to:

a) Pay for the permission to embed the font. This may not be possible in all cases, but many non-free fonts have several levels of usages much like when you are buying stock art. You may have only purchased the low-rung version of the font and you need to pay more. Or maybe you used a free font that can only be embedded if you pay for the font. I cannot really evaluate it without more information on what happened, so you are better off consulting the source of the font for details.

b) Use a different font. As much as this option might suck, you may find it easier than option A (especially if there is NO embeddable version of the font you have chosen). Sometimes there is a similar font that is free and can be embedded, you just might not realize it. You can probably crowd-source this by posting an image of a text snippet on your blog and letting people look for fonts that are "close-enough".

So there you go. Based on your blog posts, you are going to be working on this problem tomorrow. I hope this helps you get past the diagnostic stage of things. If you have further questions, feel free to contact me directly. I will do my best to assist you.