How do I embed a font into my native document?

Amazon (createspace) does not consider Pages documents as native documents. They expect Word (.doc) or PDF uploads, and even then, they are very fussy about that content, and provide downloadable tools to assist you.

You can reveal embedded PDF fonts by opening the PDF in Acrobat Reader and then the Fonts tab from File ▸ Properties. Don't forget that your header and footer text will default to Helvetica in Pages unless you deliberately set it to your body text font.

You can't embed fonts in Pages or in Word for Mac 2011. I don't know about Word for Mac 2016 yet.

Tom,

I seem to find a list of fonts contained in Pages '09 v4.3 through v5.5.3 documents using mdls in the Terminal:

mdls -name kMDItemFonts foobar.pages

and Word .docx documents contain their fonts in an internal fontTable.xml file.

Are these included font names simply a reference for the opening application to perform a system lookup to determine installed availability, and not actual embedding?

Here is how to get the fontnames out of a Word (.docx) document. Won't work for .doc.

unzip -p foobar.docx "word/fontTable.xml" | ./wrdfont.py

where wrdfont.py contains:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# read from standard input either via pipe, or command-line

import re

import sys

import fileinput

fonts = []

for line in fileinput.input():

afont = re.findall(r'(?<=w:name=)("[ \w+]+")>', line)

fonts.append(afont)

for name in fonts:

print("{}".format(' \n'.join(name)))

sys.exit()

VikingOSX wrote:

Are these included font names simply a reference for the opening application to perform a system lookup to determine installed availability, and not actual embedding?

That's correct. Word for Windows can, however, embed fonts.

PS As far as I can tell, Word for Mac 2016 still does not have this feature.

Unless Word in Office 2016 for Mac automatically embeds fonts, I see no user configurable settings that enable/disable font embedding in Word documents. Time will tell if this feature comes as an update.

You need to create a special PDF with the fonts embedded. From the Amazon/CreateSpace site (or is it Adobe?) you can download a PDF Service Plug-in for OSX. It's called "Save As Adobe PDF" (can't remember where I got my copy from). Put this into /Library/PDF Services. When you print your document instead of hitting the print button, select in the Print Dialog from the PDF popup in the bottom left corner this PDF service. It allows you to create a PDF file with embedded fonts (and other niceties). I have published a book myself and struggled with this before. Once you have that plug in everything just falls into place.

I strongly suggest you download the PDF validator plugin from CreateSpace. This is an Adobe Acrobat plug-in that validates the PDF and tells you exactly what is wrong with the PDF. Once the validation of your PDF is ok, you can be quite sure it will print with CreateSpace.

One more suggestion: PRINT your book for proof reading. DO NOT PROOF READ ON SCREEN!! I know this will kill a tree but you'll be astonished how many typos you'll spot on the printed paper that you never ever saw on screen.

Hope this helps

---markus---