/F1 10 Tf
(Hello) Tj
/F2 12 Tf
(世界) Tj
Here, F1 might be a Latin CID font, F2 a Japanese one.
A font is a costume. Times New Roman is a tuxedo; Comic Sans is a clown suit. We use these costumes to persuade you that the text is serious, or playful, or official.
But CID Font F1 is the human being standing naked in the room.
When a PDF renders the raw CID (Character Identifier) streams instead of the formatted font, the document is telling you the truth. It is stripping away the marketing, the serif, the flourish, and the societal weight of typography. It is saying: cid font f1 f2 f3 f4
"I am not a professional document. I am just data. I am vectors. I am math."
In this raw state, the text becomes egalitarian. A legal contract looks no different than a love letter when they are both rendered in raw CID streams. The aesthetic wrapper dissolves, leaving only the intent behind.
When working with PDFs (e.g., in Adobe Acrobat Pro, Ghostscript, or custom renderers), you may encounter errors like: /F1 10 Tf (Hello) Tj /F2 12 Tf (世界) Tj
Note: These roles vary by generator; always inspect the PDF’s /Font and /Encoding dictionaries to see actual mappings.
List all fonts in a PDF, showing if they are CID and their internal names:
pdffonts document.pdf
Output example:
name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
----------------- ------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
F1 CID Type0 Identity-H yes yes yes 7 0
F2 CID Type2 Identity-V yes yes yes 10 0
Why it happens: The PDF was created without embedding the actual CID font data. It only stored a reference to F1. When you open it on a system without that specific Japanese/Chinese font, the reader panics.
Solution: Use Acrobat Pro to embed the font. Go to Print Production > Preflight > Fixups > Embed missing fonts.
When a PDF is created from software like Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, or Microsoft Word (with Asian language support), the text is often embedded or referenced as a CID font. This ensures: