I was at the ISI eSolutions show recently (great event, by the way) and at lunch I sat next to a regulatory publishing specialist from a large pharma firm.

She had recently migrated from Acrobat 5 to Acrobat 7. In the course of our conversation, I discovered that her department hadn’t received any training on the transition.

Acrobat 7 introduced a new user interface and she couldn’t find the Previous View and Next View buttons.

If you are migrating from Acrobat 5 or 6 to newer version of Acrobat, there’s a good chance things will look different, perhaps a lot different to you.

In this article, I’ll talk about how to get back the Previous View and Next View buttons, and also generally discuss how to customize toolbars to save time and improve productivity.

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I recently wrote about how to embed missing fonts in a PDF.

If you have many files to fix—  the norm during regulatory filing preparation— a more automated solution is required.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use Batch Processing to process many PDFs and:

• Embed fonts where they are missing
• Move resulting "fixed" files to a new folder
• Report on any errors and move PDFs which could not be fixed to another folder

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The FDA and other regulatory agencies have specific requirements regarding fonts used in drug applications. Notably, fonts need to be embedded for compliance

Ensuring that fonts are embedded properly is not particularly difficult if documents are in your control. See my blog article on PDF Settings  for some tips.

In a perfect world, all parties which contribute to a regulatory filing would properly embed fonts. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world . . . there are times when you may need to embed fonts as a post process.

Fortunately, a new feature of Acrobat 9 Pro (and Pro Extended) is the ability to reembed fonts.

Before we get into how to do that, you need to know if the fonts are there or not.

Are the fonts embedded?

To check if fonts are embedded:

1. Choose File—> Properties
2. Click on the Fonts tab

Examine the information in the window. If all font entries say "embedded" or "embedded subset" no changes are necessary:

However, if you see an entry like the one below, you have a problem. In the case below, ArialMT is used in the document, but is not embedded.

In the remainder of this article, I’ll discuss how to reembed fonts and also provide background on the term "subset" relative to regulatory guidance.

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Today, I presented "Regulatory Compliant PDFs and Beyond", an eSeminar, with my colleague Mark Middleton.

If you attended this event, you can download a copy of the slides with notes below.

A9_LS_eSeminar_notes

For those who want to try it, you can also try the experience of downloading this file from my Acrobat.com account.