There's two types of PDF distribution workflow, embed fonts and no embed fonts. For documents contained double-byte characters, I strongly recommend that they should use the embed fonts workflow.
Please see the graphic above, if you distribute your pdf without embed fonts, there's always a lots of problems would happen. And you have to educate your receiver to install the Asian language component, no matter he's using Acrobat or reader. People get confused all the time.
So I suggest that you choose the embed fonts workflow and follow the step by step as below.
For Creator: If you want to add some double-byte characters (i.e. Chinese) in your document via MS Office or other applications, please choose the complete installation which will install all Asian language component or you may choose custom installation to decide which language you want. (P.S. Still, people get confused for the Custom setting, so it would be easier to suggest them select the Complete setting directly if they got a big hard disk.)
For Clients: There's some PDF Conversion setting for Chinese you need to setup
1. Choose "Change Conversion Settings" from Word/Excel/PowerPoint drop-down menu or from Adobe PDF printer icon in control panel.
2. I assume your default setting is "Standard", select the "Advanced Setting"
3. To have a perfect PDF that you don't have to worry the Reader configuration of client side (such as Do they install Asia fonts pack or not), the key is to remove all fonts from "Never Embed" list and make sure you select the two options- Embed all fonts, Subset embedded fonts when percent of characters used is less than 100%.
4. Save the setting and convert the file with Chinese characters to PDF, use Acrobat 7 open the pdf and select File> Document Properties. You can see they are all embedded for each fonts, that makes this pdf file a perfect pdf. The client could open this pdf via Adobe Reader English or any version without installing Asia Fonts Pack.
>For testing, I key in some characters here for your reference(It could not be seen on your screen).
繁體中文 Chinese Traditional, used in Taiwan and Hong Kong
简体中文 Chinese Simplified, used in China
げこさざしずびふぷ Japanese
ㅃㅄㅅㅆㅈㅉ Korean
ÄÖÛÜÝÞ Latin
>This is the screenshot for reference.
Exception
Yes, there's always exception. If you follow the step-by-step as above, I can assure you will create a perfect pdf. Unfortunately, not every time. Why? Some font vendors don't allow you to embed their fonts, that's why you still have the chance to have a pdf without any characters or display some black dots. Here's some hyperlink for you to explain to your customers why they got a bad pdf. Believe me, sometimes it happened, but not very often if you choose embed fonts workflow.
1.Adobe
http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/info/embedding.html
http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/legal/embeddingeula.html
http://store.adobe.com/type/embedding.html
2.Microsoft font extension, there's a tab "embed" to let you see the font permission. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/TrueTypeProperty21.mspx
If you want to have a printable version, please right-click Download file and save this pdf.
Can I add Chinese character into an existing English pdf file?
Checking Asian fonts, it is not possible to activate the function, those I do have installed all fonts including Asian languages in Acrobat 6
The file I use is not protected