| Font Tag | Typical Role / Encoding | Common Family Type | |----------|------------------------|--------------------| | | Base CIDFont – Japanese (93-1 encoding) | Kozuka Gothic Pro, Heisei Mincho | | F2 | Base CIDFont – Korean (KSC 5601) | Batang, Gulim | | F3 | Base CIDFont – Traditional Chinese (BIG5) | Adobe Ming, PMingLiU | | F4 | Base CIDFont – Simplified Chinese (GB2312) | SimSun, Fangsong | | F5 | Extended Japanese (JIS X 0212) | Kozuka Mincho Pro, Source Han Sans | | F6 | Extended Korean (Johab) | UnBatang, Nanum Gothic | | F7 | Extended Chinese (GB18030) | Noto Sans CJK, Source Han Serif |
CID fonts are a special font format developed by Adobe for handling large character sets, particularly for East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). However, the "F" series (F1, F2, etc.) often appears as in PDFs, especially when original fonts are missing.
Introduction: What Are CID Fonts? If you have ever worked with Adobe Acrobat , PostScript printers , or PDF editing software , you might have encountered a strange error: "Cannot find or create the font 'F1'." Or perhaps you saw a list of placeholders like F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, F7 in your font dropdown menu. These aren't random errors—they refer to CID (Character Identifier) fonts .
There is no official "F1 Font" from Adobe. Instead, these are placeholders. However, many third-party font foundries have released CID fallback font packs that include F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, and F7 as named files to resolve compatibility issues. Chapter 2: The F1 to F7 Font Series – What Each Represents Based on common naming conventions found in legacy publishing software (e.g., Adobe InDesign 1.5–CS2, Ghostscript, and older RIPs), the F1–F7 naming often corresponds to: