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S1000D ISO 8879:1986 Compliant Font

- Monday, 4th May 2021 (may the 4th be with you)

The PDF/A Standard requires all fonts (that is whole fonts, not subsets) to be embedded in the PDF/A file for long-term preservation.

If you use a font like Arial Unicode MS (23.5 MB) and you haven’t configured the process correctly then a simple one page document, converted to PDF/A, will be about 15 MB in size simply because it has to embed the entire Arial Unicode MS font into the PDF file.

It is important to also note that the Arial Unicode MS font does not support the full ISO 8879:1986 Character Entity set. After testing, we found the font was missing nearly a dozen character glyphs.

Our bespoke Docuneering-ISO-8879-Regular font offers FULL ISO 8879:1986 Character Entity coverage in a tiny 92 KB font package and can be embedded in the PDF file without the need for an additional and sometimes costly font licence.

For additional information about how S1000D uses the ISO 8879:1986 Character Set, please read our Blog about XML Character Entities.


S1000D v4.2 ISOEntity file


S1000D v4.2 ISO 8879:1986 Character Entities

Our Docuneering ISO-8879 Regular font


Docuneering ISO-8879 Regular font

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