Ability of OS to embed fonts in a PDF

Only Adobe Acrobat has that capability.

This is both a competitive and a licensing issue. MS always wants their Windows' products to have advantages over Mac software. This has nothing to do with OS X.

Somebody at MS doesn't know what they're talking about. If you choose OS X's / macOS's built in Save as PDF command after choosing Print, it always save subsets of the fonts used in a document in the resulting PDF.

I typed this lengthy dissertation in Word 2016.

Saved the PDF out of Word and opened it in Acrobat (full version) to check and make sure the fonts used in the document were included. They were.

Pages (any version) will embed a Font face subset in an exported PDF. As of this post date, that is PDF version 1.3.

Does Word 2016 for Mac offer the option in its Preferences to save Word documents with embedded font subsets?

Nope. Nowhere in Word 2016's preferences is there a specific option to tell it to embed fonts. All I did was choose Print (doesn't matter what printer it shows as going to), clicked PDF at the lower left, and then OS X's built in Save as PDF option. Voilà! Embedded fonts.

Choosing Save as Adobe PDF so it went through the Acrobat Distiller also correctly embedded any fonts I had in a Word 2016 document.

Thanks Kurt.

Yes, Acrobat Pro and the Distiller come together. You can't purchase the Distiller separately. Last I heard, Acrobat DC Pro was still available as a standalone purchase, as was Lightroom. That is, you didn't have to go with the monthly never-ending subscription to get it.

As I look on Adobe's site now, I can't find a perpetual license version of Acrobat DC Pro. They only show two different subscription options. Amazon.com shows a boxed full version, but it ain't cheap at $449. They also show an upgrade version for $199, but are out of stock. MacConnection has the upgrade and full version in stock. MacMall also has boxed perpetual license copies in stock.

From what I could(n't) find on Adobe's site, they may have stopped offering a boxed version of Acrobat DC Pro. Which would mean the other vendors I noted above would be what they have left. It's still the same software, just may be the last chance to get a perpetual license copy.

Why the Pro version? It's not that the built-in OS PDF generator doesn't work, but what it does do is always knock your images down to heavily compressed, and low resolution JPEGs. Were they CMYK to begin with because they needed to be? Too bad. They're RGB now.

I'm not sure how many versions back Acrobat DC Pro would accept your older version's serial number. If you purchase an upgrade DC copy and your previous version is too many back, then you'll have an upgrade copy you can't activate. Check with Adobe by calling customer support to be sure.

That is a great idea. Why spend anything if you can use the older version on another Mac to produce a PDF?

The lack of getting fonts embedded with the Distiller may be due to the Distiller itself. Here I randomly selected PDF/A-1b:2005 (CMYK) from Distiller's preset choices. The main thing to do here is press Command+E to check the settings. Click on the Fonts tab and make sure the top check box Embed all fonts is on.

With that on, Word 2016 had no problem creating a PDF through the Save as Adobe PDF option with three randomly chosen fonts activated with Suitcase Fusion.

Not that this alone is a praise worthy effort. The OS also created a PDF with the fonts embedded. The point is just to make sure that box is checked, or nothing will be embedded.