Cidfont F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 Full May 2026
To understand the identifiers, one must first understand the architecture. CID stands for Character Identifier.
In traditional PostScript (Type 1) fonts, characters are accessed via specific names (like /A, /B, /ampersand). This works well for languages with small alphabets, but it creates massive overhead for Asian languages (CJK—Chinese, Japanese, Korean) which require thousands of characters. cidfont f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f6 full
The CID-keyed font architecture was developed to solve this. Instead of using names, every character is assigned a unique integer number (a CID). A CIDFont is essentially a large font file containing the glyph outlines, but they are not mapped to specific codes (like ASCII or Unicode) directly. To make a CIDFont usable, it must be paired with a CMap (Character Map), which acts as a dictionary translating input codes (like Unicode) into the CID numbers used by the font. To understand the identifiers, one must first understand
Implication: A "full" embedding of six CIDFonts (F1 through F6) can balloon your PDF file size. Each full CIDFont can be 2MB–10MB. Six of them could add 60MB of redundant data. To understand the identifiers
Registry-Ordering: Adobe-CNS1
Primary Use: Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Cause: The font dictionary for F1 points to a missing or malformed CMap table. Solution: