But there's no requirement that non-base fonts be embedded, is there?

Yes and no.  For one, there's substitution by name, e.g. Arial <-> Helvetica, etc. However, unless their visual appearance, and in particular the individual character widths are quite similar, the results may be poor.

Then, there's font emulation. For example, Adobe Reader comes with two Multiple Master fonts (Adobe Sans, Adobe Serif), which are used to emulate fonts whose glyphs aren't available. However, as the technique essentially uses linear interpolation (without any info about the original font except basic data like character widths, boldness, slant, etc.), it's never really the typeface originally intended, although the results can look pretty decent.  Moreover, in order to get decent results with this technique, at least the font description and the character widths for the non-base font would have to be embedded, which PDF::Create doesn't do either...

In short, if you want precise results, there's no way around embedding the font including the appropriate glyph subset.

Other than those technical details, I was under the impression the OP wanted a very specific font. If s/he had been happy with some substitute for whatever sans-serif font, s/he might just as well have left Helvetica as it was (which already is sans-serif). But maybe I've misread the intentions...

In reply to Re^3: PDF::Create Fonts by almut
in thread PDF::Create Fonts by Heffstar

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