Two Font Screw-ups

I posted this photo the other day, showing how a sign at a Smithsonian location was made using the Adobe substitute font rather than in Minion, the official font of the museum:


What I didn't post was an example of what the letters should have looked like, so here's another sign, the one above the door of that same museum building:


Compare the two and see how the shapes are different. It's really obvious, especially on the italic type, since the substitute font doesn't have true italic letterforms but is instead just a slanted roman. The lowercase "a," for instance, is a two-story form in the substitute font and a one-story form in Minion. The lowercase "e" has a flat-bottomed bowl in the substitute but a curved bowl in the true italic.

How did this happen, you might wonder? Basically, I assume a PDF was sent to the sign shop to fabricate the sign, and the font should have been embedded in the PDF. But either it wasn't embedded correctly or the sign shop's software couldn't use the embedded font. The mistake was in sending the PDF that way in the first place: the sign's designers should have converted the fonts to outlines before sending the PDF to the sign shop. Then there could have been no mistake.

Here's another, much smaller mistake I saw while in Virginia:


Look closely at the last line of the headline in this ad. It's missing the letters "fi" in the word "benefits." I've never seen an error like this before, but I assume there's a problem with the "fi" ligature, and once again is happening because a PDF was sent without converting the fonts to outlines.