[pdftex] Garbling of fonts

[Mr Steven McGahey]

Dear all,

About 30% of the time, when I include pdf-images in my pdflatex documents, 
I experience a strange phenomena where the text-characters in my images get 
subtly rearranged.  Sometimes this may involve the wrong characters in the 
text (which I have partially resolved, by embedding the fonts in the pdf 
images), but more often it involves the reduction of character spacing in a 
word, making a word such as "example" have all of its characters in the one 
x-y location.

The curious thing is that when I use Adobe Acrobat (the distilling version, 
not the reader) to insert the original pdf figure as a new page, it fixes 
up *that* image in the main part of the document.  Subsequently removing 
this inserted page leaves the image fixed up.

I get the impression this may be a font issue, but can someone give me a 
bit more direction?  It's a pain in the neck having to manually re-insert 
and remove each bad image in a 140 page thesis!

Cheers,
- Steve.