Font Embedding

The practice of including the complete font data within a PDF document so that the text can be accurately rendered and read regardless of whether the font is installed on the viewer's system. Font embedding is an accessibility requirement because non-embedded fonts can cause text to display incorrectly, become unselectable, or be misread by screen readers and text extraction tools. When fonts are not embedded, assistive technologies may not be able to extract the text content at all, or may extract garbled characters. PDF/UA requires that all fonts used in a document be embedded, and accessibility checkers verify this as a baseline requirement. Font embedding also affects readability — proper embedding preserves character spacing, ligatures, and glyph rendering that impact the visual reading experience for low-vision users.