My energy company sends me pdf-bills without embedded fonts.
$ pdffonts bill_p52-e-201907_KirOE.pdf
name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
Arial CID TrueType Identity-H no no yes 4 0
Arial,Bold CID TrueType Identity-H no no yes 5 0
I think the Arial font must be substitute to Liberation Sans
@sparcher, I don’t know an answer to your question about font substitution, I haven’t seen any Linux pdf viewer doing it and displaying such files properly.
I’ve found two ways to see pdf’s without built-in windows fonts:
Easier/better one. Open them in a browser. Both Firefox and Google chrome show them fully readable. From my experience when printing such a pdf from a browser you need to enable “Print as an image” option or you’ll see the same garbled text on a printed page.
More clumsy / legacy one. Previously I’ve used to install windows PDF viewer and open it through Wine.