Printer-resident fonts are stored in a printer’s memory or on a hard drive connected to the printer. Type 1 and TrueType fonts can be stored either on the printer or on your computer; bitmap fonts are stored only on your computer. InDesign downloads fonts as needed, provided they are installed on your computer’s hard disk.

Choose from the following options in the Graphics area of the Print dialog box to control how fonts are downloaded to the printer.

None

Includes a reference to the font in the PostScript file, which tells the RIP or a post-processor where the font should be included. This option is appropriate if the fonts reside in the printer. TrueType fonts are named according to the PostScript name in the font; however, not all applications can interpret these names. To ensure that TrueType fonts are interpreted correctly, use one of the other font downloading options.

Complete

Downloads all fonts required for the document at the beginning of the print job. All glyphs and characters in the font are included even if they’re not used in the document. InDesign automatically subsets fonts that contain more than the maximum number of glyphs (characters) specified in the Preferences dialog box.

Subset

Downloads only the characters (glyphs) used in the document. Glyphs are downloaded once per page. This option typically results in faster and smaller PostScript files when used with single-page documents, or short documents without much text.

Download PPD Fonts

Downloads all fonts used in the document, even if those fonts reside in the printer. Use this option to ensure that InDesign uses the font outlines on your computer for printing common fonts, such as Helvetica and Times. Using this option can resolve problems with font versions, such as mismatched character sets between your computer and printer or outline variances in trapping. Unless you commonly use extended character sets, you don’t need to use this option for desktop draft printing.