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These 14 fonts are Post Script fonts for PDF Readers (like Acrobat Reader). The PDF specification says that standard PDF readers must support these fonts – and most of them do. That means, all good PDF readers have those 14 fonts built-in. You do not need to care, if the fonts are installed on target machines and there is no need to ship them with your documents or to embed them into your documents - which keeps the generated PDF documents as small as possible.

 

The Base 14 fonts are:

This makes up 14 fonts, because each attribute (bold, italic, bold-italic) for Helvetica, Times and Courier is counted as one additional font.

 

Advantages of using the Base 14 fonts:

•No need to care, if the fonts are installed, no need to ship them with your documents or to embed them into your PDF documents.

•Generated PDF documents are as small as possible.

 

Disadvantages of using the Base 14 fonts:

•Some character sets are not supported. Supported character sets are: WinAnsi, WinEastEurope, WinTurkish, WinBaltic, IsoLatin1, IsoLatin2, IsoLatin5, IsoLatin7, IsoLatin9. MacRoman is nearly fully supported, but the following characters are missing:
unicode 221e (ansi code 176) INFINITY
unicode 220f (ansi code 184) GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI
unicode 03c0 (ansi code 185) GREEK SMALL LETTER PI
unicode 222b (ansi code 186) INTEGRAL
unicode 03a9 (ansi code 189) GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA
unicode 2248 (ansi code 197) ALMOST EQUAL TO (asymptotic to)
unicode f8ff (ansi code 240) Apple Logo

•Windows Platform only. When previewing or printing a VPE document (not a PDF document!) that uses the Base 14 fonts (note: this applies currently only to the Windows version, for the other platforms there is no preview / direct printing capability): The metrics of the base 14 fonts are nearly identical to their True-Type pendants, but they are not 100% identical. When using an on-screen preview, or if printing directly via VPE, the Windows font manager will choose the True-Type font counterparts of the post script fonts for the output device (this is called font-substitution), and documents render quite well, but you can not expect 100% perfectness. This means, in regular (99,99%) you will not be able to detect any visible flaws. Text might be rendered slightly a bit more dense than it would, if a True-Type font was used directly for rendering a document (without substitution).
By the way: Acrobat Reader for Windows itself substitutes the Helvetica, Times and Courier fonts with its True-Type pendants.

•The PDF/A standard, which defines documents for long-time archival, says that even the base 14 fonts (i.e. the postscript data) must be embedded into PDF documents in order to make them PDF/A compliant. Currently VPE is not capable of creating PDF/A documents, but a future version will. However, at the time of this writing we can not guarantee that VPE will be able to embed the base 14 fonts into PDF documents, because of technical as well as for licensing issues.