Since the original font cannot be found, Acrobat outputs PostScript using Adobe Sans and/or Adobe Serif in the PostScript stream and feeds that to the Distiller which them embeds those fonts in the refried PDF file. That is the situation in which a PDF with non-embedded fonts and for which the fonts are not installed on the user's system is printed from Acrobat to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance, a process known as “refrying a PDF file” which is strongly discouraged by Adobe for some fairly obvious reasons. (2) There are some very limited situations in which Adobe Sans and/or Adobe Serif can end up showing as the font of the text and possibly even embedded in a PDF file. These two Multiple Master technology fonts have the capability of matching the set widths of any other Western Latin font. Missing ITC Zapf Dingbats are replaces with Adobe Pi, and for anything else using a Western Latin character set, Adobe Sans or Adobe Serif is used depending on whether the original font was a san serif or serif style. For fonts such as Helvetica, Times, and Courier, Acrobat has the “smarts” to use system fonts Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New respectively since they generally have identical set widths to the original fonts. This is the case in which the creator of the PDF file didn't embed the font and Acrobat has to try to find the font installed on the user's system or use a substitution font. It you open a PDF file and look at the Fonts panel of Document Properties (Ctrl-D), for a particular font entry, the only place you would see Adobe Sans or Adobe Serif would be as the font listed as Actual Font. As Bo indicates, they are special substitution fonts used by Acrobat and some other Adobe applications.

They are not installed or otherwise available for normal application use. (1) A document could absolutely not have originally been created using Adobe Sans or Adobe Serif.

Adobe sans mm