PDF Files change fonts when emailing

What do you mean "attach them to an e-mail"? You can't use specialty fonts in an e-mail. PDF has support for embedded fonts. Fonts in e-mail are just something someone hacked up one day - literally. They are just a very limited form of HTML. No web fonts or anything like that available.

Without knowing about the typeface, it looks like you are opening the document on the right in Preview. Preview is likely unable to render the typeface used to create the notes; the "font" may not be embedded on the document or the rendering structure wasn't created to spec. If you open the emailed document using Adobe Reader, it would likely look ok. It's possible that Apple Preview hasn't full implemented something that is in the program you used to create the original pdf. Pdfs are ... complicated ... to say the least.

It is very unusual to create a custom font. The burden is on you to prove that the font fully conforms to applicable specifications. Adobe’s software tries very hard to display all content. As such, it is a good tool for viewing, but a very poor tool for creating. When testing this font, you need to use tools that are more strict. You can’t assume that everyone has the latest version of Adobe Acrobat.

YamahaC3 wrote:

Should be fine.

Your evidence suggests otherwise.

All these years I thought Acrobat Reader simply "took a scan" within the program and the output was saved. Period. Seems that's not true anymore. Maybe with the more advanced "Pro" options they've pushed the program beyond the limits of just producing what's actually viewable on the page.

When I look at your screenshots, it looks like the PDF is displaying correctly on some kind of web-based Adobe cloud service. That would seem to suggest that the fonts are embedded inside the document and that Adobe's cloud service can read and display them.

Maybe try to open your documents with Master PDF Editor: https://code-industry.net/get-masterpdfeditor/

This is a program I use to open PDF documents that Apple Preview cannot to open. You can download a free version that can open any document, but watermarks any documents it creates. Then, you can easily go to File > Properties > Fonts and see if the fonts are actually embedded. If there is some kind of problem, perhaps it will say something.

Unfortunately, in these situations, it doesn't really matter who is right or wrong. Apple and Adobe are two competing companies with large market footprints. You can demand all of your recipients use Acrobat to open the document. Some will. Some, like me, will not. If you were an equally powerful entity, like a government, then I might use something like Master PDF Editor to get the PDF and do what I need with it. But otherwise, I wouldn't bother with it at all. If you want to reach everyone, you will have to find out exactly where it is broken and change what you are doing so that it isn't broken.

And, it took a couple of years to complete. Fontographer.

That is likely the problem. Especially if you built this quite a while ago and the resulting TrueType font was given a .suit extension by Fontographer.

The main problem there being it would be a non-Unicode font.

Give this a try. Use any of the many free online font converters to change your font to OpenType. Your pick if you want it to be of the PostScript or TrueType variety. They're easy to use. You upload a font via the site's interface, and it gives you a link to download the converted font. Here's a couple:

https://convertio.co/font-converter/

https://www.fontconverter.org/

Of course, the question becomes - why does it work on your end as expected, but nowhere else?

YamahaC3 wrote:

I believe it has something to do with Big Sur and possibly a newer version of Mail (on the new Laptop.) So far, I've found that if you change the advanced option to show the PDF file as an "icon", it sends fine-- however, that has to be done with each email and that's too time-consuming.

If that causes the document to send fine, then your problem is solved - there is no problem. This "advanced option" is a no-op. It does absolutely nothing to the e-mail itself. It only changes how it appears when you compose the message.

YamahaC3 wrote:

Changing the PDFs one by one isn't what's needed in the long term.

What I meant was changing those PDFs one by one only affects how they display on your computer.

One trick you could try is to make sure all of your PDFs are at least two pages. Multi-page PDFs will always display, and be sent, as attachments.

YamahaC3 wrote:

when I attach them to an email, the specialty font defaults to a wonky, odd symbol look.

Please post a screenshot that illustrates what you are talking about.