How to embed fonts in a pdf of your manuscript

Sometimes when uploading a pdf of your formatted book to a print on demand company, you’ll get a warning message that fonts are not embedded your file.

Most of the time, this won’t be a problem. To make the process easier, companies often simply will embed the fonts for you. If you’re using common, standard fonts such as Times Roman, all will be fine.

However, if using a specialty font that you downloaded from the Internet or created on your own, or if using nonstandard characters (such as checkmarks and bullet points), this may be problematic. Those fonts and characters will be replaced with default settings, and that almost certainly will mess up your layout or at least introduce goofy looking letters that make no sense at various spots in your manuscript (For example, bullet points might be replaced with the letter n or g).

If that occurs in your manuscript, you’ll want to embed the fonts in a pdf of your manuscript and upload that new version.

Embedding fonts in your manuscript is easy if using Microsoft Word:
• Open the Microsoft Word document of your manuscript
• Click “File” and “Save As”
• Select .PDF as the file type
• Check “Optimize for Standard” option
• In the lower right side of this window, click the “Tools” dropdown arrow
• Select “Save Options”
• A new window will pop up; check “Embed all fonts in this file”
• Right below it, uncheck “Do not embed common system fonts”
• Click “OK”
• Click “Save”

The pdf of your manuscript now has all of the fonts used in your Word document embedded in it. Upload this new pdf to your print on demand vendor.

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Comments

[Katherine Hayward]

Great article! I am using Georgia 12 pt for the body of my text in my novel, Franklin Gothic Heavy 16 pt for chapter headings and and Franklin Gothic Heavy 26 pt for the cover title and information. Can these fonts be easily embedded by CreateSpace on my behalf? I am a first time Authour and do not have the experience to do so myself.

[Inventing Reality Editing Service]

CreateSpace should be able to embed those fonts for you without a problem, Katherine. You'll always have the opportunity to see what the manuscript looks like after they've done so...and if it doesn't look right, you then can go back and embed the fonts using the method described above and reupload the manuscript.

[Z_Alliski]

This is interesting. Thanks for the info. I had some problems with this in the past so this is helpful.