: Typically represents the primary body font or the regular style of the primary typeface (e.g., Arial Regular or Times New Roman Regular).
: Represent additional stylized variations, such as italics, secondary subheadings, or distinct character sets used within the document.
How to Fix PDF Fonts Automatically for Accessibility ... - PDFix
These usually represent the primary body text and heading fonts. In older or poorly optimized PDFs, F1 and F2 are often stored as simple, non-embedded fallback fonts or basic TrueType subsets. cid font f1 f2 f3 f4 better
Unlike simple fonts (Type 1 or TrueType) that map a single byte to a glyph, CID fonts are designed for large character sets. A CID font separates the (the set of glyphs) from the CMAP (character map). The PDF specification uses numeric labels—often F1, F2, F3, F4 —as font aliases or internal names for these CID-keyed fonts when the original font name is missing or when subsetting occurs.
In a typical document, F1 is usually the used for body paragraphs. If you need to optimize for speed, focus on F1. Since it renders the majority of the text, ensuring F1 is subsetted correctly (not fully embedded) drastically reduces file size.
Screen readers rely on reliable font-to-text mappings. When a document uses nondescript F1, F2, F3, F4 tags without proper /ToUnicode tables, accessibility breaks. A better approach ensures that every CID font carries a reversible mapping to Unicode. : Typically represents the primary body font or
If you want, tell me which toolchain you’re using (e.g., Adobe Acrobat, fonttools/ttx, Ghostscript, HarfBuzz+PDF library) and I’ll produce concrete steps and commands to generate and test F1–F4 variants.
When a PDF or PostScript file is created, the font is often renamed to a standard key to save space and avoid conflicts. These keys are frequently mapped as F1, F2, F3, and F4 .
You open a PDF, and Acrobat screams: "Cannot find or create the font 'F1'." This happens because the F1 reference exists in the font dictionary, but the embedded stream is corrupted or missing. - PDFix These usually represent the primary body
Open the file in a tool like Infix or the Adobe Community suggested method of opening in Preview (Mac) and re-exporting as a PDF.
While subsetting reduces file size, embedding the full font (if allowed) ensures that every character can be displayed, regardless of how the PDF is used later.
Use the "Transparency Flattener" to convert the text to outlines, which removes the need for the font entirely but makes the text uneditable. Impossible fonts to be found / Fontes impossíveis de achar
| Issue | Solution | |-------|----------| | F1 appears in PDF text | Missing embedded font → re-export PDF with embedding | | F1 in print output | Install original font or map F1 to a readable font | | F1/F2/F3/F4 in Ghostscript | Create custom Fontmap.GS with (F1) /NotoSansCJK-Regular | | Want to avoid substitution | Convert all text to outlines (last resort) |