I have a custom invoice template (docx) which uses Helvetica (non-bold), but when I preview/print an invoice to PDF all the Helvetica is rendered as Helvetica-Bold in QBO

More detail:  I have Helvetica and Helvetica-Bold fonts installed on my Windows PC.  I've created a (.docx) custom invoice template which uses a mixture of Helvetica and Helvetica-Bold (I've also tried removing all Helvetica-Bold from the document).

If I print the document to PDF locally on my PC using Adobe Acrobat Pro it renders correctly in the resulting PDF, i.e. Helvetica and Helvetica-Bold render correctly.

But when I upload the document to QBO as a custom invoice template, the PDFs created when I preview/print the invoices contain only BOLD Helvetica text, i.e. the "Helvetica" has been converted to / rendered as "Helvetica-Bold".  If I open the resulting PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro and analyse the document I find Helvetica-Bold is embedded, but Helvetica (not bold) is not!!?

So, why is QBO changing my Helvetica to Helvetica-Bold in my uploaded custom templates?

Please help!   Thanks.

I appreciate the in-depth information you've shared, @andrew-stanton.

Let's re-import your custom invoice template using another browser to get this fixed.

First off, you'll need to make sure that the font of the document is not a mixture of Helvetica and Helvetica-Bold. This way, QuickBooks won't change the font upon previewing or printing invoices.

Here are the browsers you can use to re-import your custom invoice template:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari

Once you've already imported the template, you can now try to preview/print an invoice to double-check.

If QuickBooks still converting the font to Helvetica-Bold, I encourage uploading your template here in the thread. This way, we can further check the document and help you upload a custom form style and print an invoice with the correct font.

Before uploading the document, please remove all the important information, like addresses, company, and contact information.

Feel free to leave a reply below if you have additional questions. I'll keep an eye on your reponse.

Hi Mark,

Thank you for your advice, however after trying different browsers and a few different test documents with a mixture of Helvetica weights I decided to give up and use Arial Unicode MS, which works no problem.  It's possible the issue is somehow due to my particular variant of Helvetica not being licensed for embedding in PDFs, but I can't confirm this.

Thanks for your help anyway.

Andrew, don't give up!  I just found a work-around.  In my Word template I made my font Helvetica Light instead of Regular and it uploaded normal looking.  I was having the same issue. When using Helvetica Regular it uploaded Bold.  

We can't go to Arial because the spacing between lines is too big and would make our template go to two pages (we have some standard text at the bottom of each order).   It's too bad b/c we like the look of the Arial horizontally (easier to read) but I couldn't figure out how to adjust vertially (so to speak).

Ps:  Hey Intuit,  I love when questions are marked solved when the result was 'client gave up trying'!  

Hey info44 thanks for the work-around I'll give it a try!

I agree the line spacing with Arial is way too deep, but we worked around it (why is everything a work-around?..) by setting the Line Spacing to 0.65 (so in Word, select your paragraph/lines, right-click -> Paragraph -> Indents and Spacing -> Spacing, set Line Spacing: to "Single" and At: to "0.65").

Woah!  I didn't know you could input a decimal.  

This is the best experience I've ever had finding answers to QB fails.  Thank you!  'High Five'