Embedding fonts in Matlab figures and PDF for conference
and how to workaround it using Inkscape
TL;DR at the end of this post
السلام عليكم!
Hello beautiful people,
It is your first time publishing, just like me, or it is the first time your pdf file was rejected because not all fonts are embedded.
Maybe you are producing your paper using LaTex and you attached a figure produced by Matlab which, for some reason, uses fonts that usually are not embedded in produced pdf files when compiled by your favorite LaTex software. If you have a similar problem, then go a head and download inkscape for free then keep reading:
If you look up solutions for this problem in the internet, you can find many posts about it and I tried a couple of them without success. The solution that worked for me is nowhere in the internet and I though I should share it here for more people to make use of it.
If you are one of these people who don’t care about figures quality and would just export Matlab figures into JPEG or PNG or whatever and put it in your paper then, congrats. Your figures does not have fonts to embed or anything to worry about. But this solution below is not for you.
However, people embedding figures with EPS format or any vector format would face this problem and I assume you are facing it right now.
Figure 1: figure generated by Matlab for use as an example
Here Figure 1 is generated by Matlab. If you save this figure as pdf in Matlab then open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC > right click > Document Properties > Fonts, you can see the fonts in the figure and that the word (Embedded) is messing which should appear beside every font name. See screenshot below.
Screenshot 1: pdf figure 1 opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC then right click > Document Properties > Fonts
Lets do our magic trick now. Open your vector graphic figure in Inkscape.
Press OK
save As… and save the file with same format as the original file
Make sure that Convert texts to paths is ticked and click OK
Congratulation!!!
Your figure now have no fonts and instead they are converted into paths in a vector graphic that can be resized without losing quality of the figure.