Graphic designers: what's the mysterious missing link between a home-made PDF and a universally-printable ad image?

I'm a layperson, not a graphic designer. But your issue with the font last year is because you didn't http://waltshiel.com/2009/01/08/pdf-fonts-full-embed-or-subset/ I had to learn about this the hard way too (Chinese characters in my case), so I always embed subsets of fonts now. Whatever program you use to create the PDF, check if it has an option for a "press ready" PDF. That will create a PDF with the correct DPI for printing and embedded fonts, which will lead to higher quality printing. The blog I linked to about embedding has another post on http://waltshiel.com/2009/01/04/creating-a-books-print-ready-pdf/ that was pretty good.

Turning off antialiasing and rasterizing your text goes well beyond "not the best method" IMHO. It might give barely acceptable results for newsprint, where things are going to be a bit blurry no matter what you do, but it's still bad advice. Even at 1:1 resolution you're still winding up with aliased text. Pagemaker can read EPS, can't it? I'd bet you'd get much better results if you used that for your small-town newspaper. Yes, I am a design snob. Aliased text literally makes my skin crawl. There are certain badly-kerned billboards in my area that I drive out of my way to avoid.

What he did was http://www.google.com/search?q=embedding+fonts+in+pdf. What you're looking for is somebody to http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/preflight to avoid this, and many, many other problems. Try contacting a professional, or advertising in Craigslist and asking them to do it for you - and you might expect to pay extra because the tools you're using might require them to recreate some, or all, of your art in the appropriate formats.

Use the PDF-X setting. When you go to the Print dialog in Pages, the PDF button has the PDF-X option as the sixth item. This will embed the font(s).

I don't know iWorks, but what Orb2069 & Gemmy said is correct. Definitely a font embed issue. A lot of making print-ready PDFs assume you have at least Acrobat Professional (can't use just reader), so they may not entirely work for you. In a cursory google on Embedding Fonts & iWorks, it sounds like it is problematic (silly Apple!). I don't know iWorks at all, but here's a couple of possible work arounds: If you can save your file as a TIFF or JPEG or some other Pixel Based image you won't have that issue. You want the final image to be 300 Dots per Inch at 100% size and you want the colors to be CMYK (not RGB). You should not see any loss of quality at those settings. OR, if there is the option to take the typeface and turn it all into outlines/paths (ie, turn it into ART not text), you'll also be fine. Of course, you can't easily change your text after that, so make sure you don't save over your original. Finally, you could make your PDF as you have done and then send it **AND** a folder with the typefaces you used to your printer along with a printout of what it should look like. That does put a bit more of the responsibility on the printer, but it is still a Standard Operating Procedure (just usually with original files, not PDFs). Let the printer know you're going to be doing that.

Oh, and make sure to de-select anti-aliasing when you import, so edges of type stay nice and crisp.

I asked some designy friends how this could be, when a PDF is itself a photo of the image of the ad.The PDF does contain an image of the dogs. However, within these files, text is represented as regular text (ASCII or UTF, to be technical) with markup to declare it to be of font "whatever". This makes it easy to change the font, and works great on your machine, because you found the font and installed it on your computer; however the print shop didn't do this step (pricey!) and hence the printer used the ugly font as a fall-back. PDF isn't just a bitmap or image. It is in theory a Portable Document Format. This is supposed to mean you can ship it to a friend or print shop and they can both view and edit it. In practice, the software to edit PDFs is expensive and as you've discovered, fonts aren't as portable as they should be.

https://www.createspace.com/en/community/thread/3735;jsessionid=29A988C7C34ABF321E373A916FF348D5.clearspaceworker00 there are relatively cheap ways to solve the problem... it might not be as simple as it is with Adobe Acrobat Pro, but it looks like it'll do the job.

Here's another option: If you have Photoshop, you can import your PDF into PS, then Flatten it. This will "bake" everything into a single image which you can then save as a Photoshop PDF. I sometimes have to do this when sending a file to someone using old software that can't handle transparencies that may be present.