Expert: Amy - 10/5/2006

Question
Illustrator 10 on a 1.6 GHz Power PC G5 runing OS x . 10.4.7.  
Saving an Illustrator file as a .pdf sometimes results in a jumbling
of the text.

Answer
Hi Jud,

If by jumbling of the text you mean the baselines seem to go up and down little hills, there is no fix for this. It is the font. Some truetype fonts (especially those downloaded for free) just don't seem to work with Illustrator. I can think of a few that I have that don't work. Antique Olive, Albertus are two that come to mind.

Do you see the same jumbling if you convert that same block of text to outlines?

Sometimes fonts aren't embeddable - this, too, can result in jumbling of text.

Not embedding the fonts, of course, can also result in that but you'd recognize that error right away.

Workarounds include high res tiffs if you're only working with small blocks of text or headlines or, unfortunately, choosing another font.

If the jumble you mention is something other than what I described, let me know!

Amy