Pasting into adobe only shows question mark boxes?

Hello ​@mld30,

Thank you for reaching out, and we understand how frustrating this must be.

The question mark boxes appearing when you paste text are a font encoding issue within the PDF template itself. The template was likely created using a font that is not embedded or not available on your Mac, so when you paste text into it, Acrobat cannot render the characters and displays question marks instead. Since this happens regardless of where you copy the text from, the issue is with the template rather than your Mac or Acrobat.

A couple of things worth checking and trying:

Go to Acrobat > Preferences > Page Display, and under Rendering, make sure Use Local Fonts is checked. Restart Acrobat and try again.

If that does not resolve it, check which fonts the template is using by going to File > Properties > Fonts tab. This will tell you whether the fonts are embedded or missing, which helps confirm the root cause.

Could you also share the following so we can assist further:

Your Acrobat version under Menu > Help > About Adobe Acrobat, your macOS version, and whether the PDF template came from a specific source or application.

Please let us know how it goes.

~Tariq