Placing PDFs with missing fonts (Publisher)

[rogershuff]

I am sent PDFs from advertisers for a magazine I edit. When placing them in Publisher (2.2.0) sometimes they display correctly and sometimes not. Usually I can switch Passthrough to Interpret (and maybe back) to fix things but with one, I could not fix the letter spacing errors (see screenshot). In the example I tracked this down to the originator using a font called 'OpenSans' whereas my Mac has fonts called 'Open Sans' (note the space). If I open such a PDF in Affinity Photo, I am alerted to this problem (see second screenshot, from a different PDF). In Publisher, I am not alerted. Seems like this would be a useful thing to implement. I have taken to opening such PDFs in Photo and exporting as a high-quality JPG and using that. Oddly, going File>Open and opening a PDF in Photo gives the alert, but creating a blank file first (say a 300dpi A4 page) and using File>Place does not show the alert. Mind you, placing a PDF into a blank Photo file does not show the text spacing error! Thoughts? Mac OS Ventura 13.5. 27" Mac 2017.

[kenmcd]

The spacing "errors" are because space characters are often not included in PDFs, there is just open space, so the editing application has to guess where to put the actual space characters.
Some applications are better than others at this guessing.
And some applications help this process by including actual space characters (Affinity now does this).

OpenSans is the PostScript name of the original Open Sans Regular v1.10.
The PostScript Name is used when embedding font into a PDF.
Newer versions from Google Fonts have OpenSans-Regular as the PostScript Name.
This may have caused a mis-match on the font.

The font displayed in your "Publisher - wrong" image is not Open Sans.
So you will need to check that and set it correctly.

Note: the newer versions of Open Sans have slightly larger vertical metrics, so even if you set the font to Open Sans Regular you will may need to change the leading settings. They probably used a fixed leading in the original PDF source.

Your other images also look like different fonts.

Regarding the square bullets, sometimes these are from an OS-specific symbol font (and may not even be Unicode). Sometimes they are simply not encoded properly to be displayed as Unicode compliant bullets.

We would have to see your original PDF to determine exactly what is going on.