PDF Font Problems Within SAP

As far as I know, you have a problem with draft invoices converted & E-Mailed as PDF. You observed a font problem: When you convert & E-Mail the invoice as PDF, you don’t see the nice and carefully tailored font settings within the PDF file. Instead, you see substitude fonts in various sizes.

We have experienced this problem before. Roughly; the reason lies within the PDF engine buried deep within SAP R/3 (platform independent). If the PDF engine doesn’t like the font settings within SAP SmartForms, it simply substitudes the disliked font (or font size) with another one. The mentioned PDF engine is completely binary code, and we have no way to modify this awkard behavior.

However, we are not out of solutions. Here is my suggestion:

• If you want to send the PDF invoice internally, you can still use the PDF engine at the cost of font substitution. I don’t think that your employees would mind the font change.
• If you want to send the PDF invoice to a client and preserve the nice format, you have to use another way of creating PDF files, for which you should take the following steps:
• You need to have Adobe Acrobat (or a similiar PDF creator) on your local computer. You have one of those, AFAIK.
• You have to mark Adobe Acrobat as your default printer.
• Just “Reprint” the invoice, selecting the “Default local printer” as your target printer within SAP. This printer may not be defined yet, I will make sure that you have it soon.
• SAP will send the printout to your local PC, which will use the local PDF creator to “Save As…” the printout in PDF format. Adobe Acrobat preserves the original format very accurately. From there, you can send the PDF file to the clients.

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