I'm not familiar with Aurelon's PDF engine. The Adobe-branded PDF engines do get updated in the Onyx Thrive and RasterLink Pro installations. We output a LOT of Adobe-centric artwork either created in-house or by other clients. I haven't had any serious problems, even when using new features in a new release of Adobe Illustrator.
Regarding fonts, in my own design work I almost always convert any live type objects to raw vector outlines when making a design "final." If I open up that file 10 years from now I'm not going to feel like hunting down a particular
flavor of a certain typeface to make that file open accurately. It's pretty common for fonts to be updated numerous times. The version of Arial in
Windows 11 is far different from the one bundled in
Windows XP. It's also common for multiple vendors to make their own versions of the same typeface.
With live type objects the same exact font file has to be installed in the
computer that was used when the art file was originally created. That's not easy to do when a several years or even over a decade worth of time has passed. People change computers every few years. Applications get upgraded more frequently. Yet the way those applications handle type objects can change in big ways. I've opened ancient CorelDRAW CDR files with live text on path effects only to see the results go absolutely haywire even when I had the same exact font files installed. By the end of the 1990's I was done with keeping live font objects in my layouts unless I had a very good reason to make an exception.
Even now keeping live font objects in layouts is a liability. Pretty soon Adobe is going to kill Postscript Type 1 font support in its applications (even though they're the ones who created Postscript). That's not so great for old timers like me who first learned Illustrator in the 1990's. All of the bundled fonts that came with the application were Type 1 fonts. At the very least, those of us who have substantial collections of old T1 fonts will need to get conversion software in order to keep using those still valuable fonts. I'm even more glad I got into the habit of converting live type objects to outlines.
OTF Variable Fonts are another issue. I almost always have to convert those live type objects to outlines prior to production. More often than not OTF Variable Fonts have glyphs that contain overlapping paths. That's a GIANT freaking problem when cutting lettering out of vinyl or routing channel letter faces or backs. It's easy to remove those overlaps within Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. But the user has to remember to do it. Converting the type to outlines is one step in that process to weld over those overlaps.
