A CID font is one half of what the PDF standard calls a composite font: a font that can hold thousands of characters and picks each by number. “CIDFont+F1” is a name, not a typeface: the program that wrote the PDF put the font in the file under a generic label such as F1 or F2 instead of the typeface’s real name.

What is a CID-keyed font?

Ordinary PDF fonts map one byte to one character. The standard describes the alternative: “CID-keyed fonts provide a convenient and efficient method for defining multiple-byte character encodings and fonts with a large number of glyphs.” Each character is identified by a number, its CID, and a map called a CMap turns the codes in the text into those numbers.

The simplest map is Identity-H, “The horizontal identity mapping for 2-byte CIDs”: each two-byte code in the text is the character’s number in the font. A test file we drew with Quartz, the PDF writer built into macOS 27.0.1, on October 12, 2026, with one line in Hiragino Sans:

name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
AAAAAB+HiraginoSans-W3               CID Type 0C       Identity-H       yes yes no       6  0

Why does a PDF list CIDFont+F1, F2 or F3?

Because the program that made it named the fonts that way. One knowledge-base article for a print workflow server says: “The Print to PDF from Microsoft generates PDF files assigning the CIDFont+F1 and CIDFont+F2 fonts.” When the font is embedded, the document displays correctly; only the typeface’s real name is lost.

Where do you see CIDFont+F1?

In Acrobat’s Document Properties > Fonts, in the pdffonts list, in a preflight report, and in the missing-font warning of a design app that opens the PDF, since no installed typeface has that name.

Why does Acrobat say it cannot find or create the font CIDFont+F1?

In an Adobe Community thread titled CIDFont+F1 issue, a Reader user wrote in 2018: “I get an error message saying that CIDFont+F1 cannot be created or found. The file opens but the text is just displayed as a series of dots.”

The viewer has no usable copy of the font and cannot build a substitute. Adobe’s help explains the dots: “Fonts from some languages or with unknown encodings cannot be substituted. In such cases, the text appears as bullets in the file.”

What does “CIDFont+F1 contains bad /Widths” mean?

A PDF gives each font a table of character widths. For a CID font, the standard says: “Widths for a CIDFont are defined using the DW and W entries in the CIDFont dictionary. These widths shall be consistent with the actual widths given in the CIDFont program.” The message says that table is broken or out of line with the font; export the PDF again from the source.

What does a CID font mean for an edit in PDF Textfix?

PDF Textfix edits text in Identity-H CID fonts, TrueType and CFF, with the font inside the document. While you type in a CID-keyed CFF font, whose characters have no names, the line editor previews your text in the closest installed face; the saved file still uses the embedded font. Text in a CID font with a predefined Chinese, Japanese or Korean encoding is locked, and so is vertical text; the manual’s list of locked lines gives each reason as the line shows it. Other causes are covered in why you can’t edit the text in a PDF.

What can you do about CIDFont+F1?

Export the PDF again from its source document with the real fonts embedded. To edit it in a design app instead, assign an installed typeface there.

Questions about CIDFont+F1

Can I download CIDFont+F1?

No. It is a label inside one PDF, not a typeface, and the F1 of one file has nothing to do with the F1 of another. If a viewer shows dots or reports the font missing, the file has no usable copy; export it again from the source.

What are CIDFont+F2 and CIDFont+F3?

Further fonts of the same document, labeled the same generic way. The number says nothing about the typeface; pdffonts or Document Properties shows each one’s type.