Adobe enterprise product blog | David McMahon

Issue

When you convert PDF files to PDF/A using LiveCycle ES2, and then validate the files with a PDF validator, you receive the following error:

The embedded font program ‘PZSWZL+CustomSymbol’ cannot be read.

The font PZSWZL+CustomSymbol must be embedded.

Validation in LiveCycle ES2 and Acrobat 8 or 9 validates the PDF/A without errors.  Validation with current validators such as Acrobat X Preflight, or 3 Heights PDF Validator produce the error above.

Solution

This issue is a problem in LiveCycle ES2 (9.0.0.0, 9.0.0.1, and 9.0.0.2) as it should also return an error that the PDF/A is invalid.  This issue is fixed in LiveCycle ES3 (LC10) and later.  There is a patch available for ES2 SP1 and SP2, so contact enterprise support if you require one of these patches.

Additional information

PDF 1.4 recognizes only the following cmaps for TrueType fonts:

• cmap subtable with platform ID 3 and encoding ID 1 (Microsoft Unicode, also called  [3,1])
• cmap subtable with platform ID 1 and encoding 0 (Macintosh Roman, also called [1,0])

In this case, the PDF file was using a custom font CustomSymbol that contained a (3, 0) cmap subtable, which PDF 1.4 doesn’t recognize.  Therefore, Acrobat X and other PDF/A validators correctly reported an error when checking for PDF/A-1b compliance (As PDF/A-1b is based upon PDF 1.4).

reference: (181779161/2714061)