My insurance company asked me to fill out an application for account activation due to the recent functionality expansion. All I had to do was download the generated PDF document, print it out, sign it and send to them. Seemed a piece of cake. Not this time. When I tried to open the document I encountered an error saying that Arial Unicode MS font could not be found in the system. I thought that I would find it on Windows (I use Linux). Unfortunately, it quickly turned out that the font is added to your system when you install MS Office suite (versions >= 2007)! I worked around the problem but then the next error informed me about absence of Microsoft Sans Serif font in my system...
Two things I have to complain about. First, assuming that every customer uses Windows and, what's more, every customer has MS Office installed is ridiculous.
Second, if the document I'm trying to open requires some fonts not present in my system I would like to be informed about all of them at once. I don't like installing one font and then checking again whether the document opens at last, repeating the process several times - it's irritating.
Advice: When creating a content that is meant to be read by the customers use only common fonts or, better, generic font families. If you still want to use a non-standard font you have to embed it in the document (both PDF and CSS3 support font embedding).
Observed at: mojacompensa.pl
UPDATE:
Today I received an e-mail from mojacompensa.pl (translated from Polish):
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your observation, we are investigating the problem and we will contact when it is resolved.
Meanwhile I am sending you an application for your account activation attached.
After signing please send it back to the Insurance Company.
Yours faithfully,
B.S.
As you could expect, the attached document suffers from the same problem of unavailable fonts. I wonder if those people feel that they have really helped...
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