Cyrillic character sets contain the alphabet characters for languages, such as Russian and Ukrainian. Symbol character sets contain non-text characters, rather than alphabet characters. SC & OSF character sets contain specially designed letters and numbers to customize a document's appearance. Expert character sets include fraction and ligature characters for the English alphabet. The ISO Latin 1 character set (or standard Type 1 character set) includes the standard English, French, Italian, and German alphabet characters, as well as punctuation characters and numbers. Character sets for Type 1 fonts, for example, can include one or more of the ISO Latin 1, Expert, Small Capitals and Old Style Figures (SC & OSF), Symbolic, Cyrillic, and Kanji character sets: In addition to the font type, Acrobat Distiller uses the font character set to determine what font information to include in the PDF files it creates. Mac OS font types include: Type 1 fonts, Apple TrueType dFonts, TrueType fonts, and OpenType Fonts from Adobe. Windows font types include: Type 1 fonts (or PostScript fonts), Type 3 fonts, Windows bitmap and vector fonts, TrueType fonts, and Open Type Fonts from Adobe (Windows 2000 and XP).

Acrobat Distiller recognizes all Windows and Mac OS fonts however, the type of font that you use (for example, TrueType) determines how Acrobat Distiller handles the information for that font.