Unable to search for arabic words in a pdf document

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 21, 2020
1 reply
8297 views

I am using Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.

I have an arabic text in pdf document in which I am unable to search for words. No words in the document are found even though they do exist.

I will appreciate any help as to why I cannot search for words in the document.

Windows

Zaid Al Hilali

Community Expert

Can you make sure that your text is not an image, or outlined?

It could be related to the fonts used in the PDF, let us know what are the fonts used in the document by going to the following menu… File > Properties, then click on the "Fonts" tab to see the list of Arabic fonts. To make it easier for you, do provide screenshot of the list.

M

M5F98Author

Participant

It's not an image, but I don't know if it's outlined or not

S

Samer_M

Participating Frequently

In regards to your original question that text is unsearchable, I can see that the font in the document is Simplified Arabic, this font is a strictly Windows font that doesn't exist on Mac machines. If your Machine is a Mac, I believe the text in your PDF will not appear correctly, hence unsearchable. If you're on a Windows machine, then the content should be searchable, but then I believe something else preventing you from searching the content.

As for copying Arabic text in order to use it elsewhere, this is yet another unsupported PDF issue which many users have discussed many times on this forum. See although Acrobat do support Arabic in some areas, yet few features don't support Arabic at all, unfortunately, at least for the time being as Acrobat Team do say they're considering to fix it.

Hi Zaid, I'm using Adobe Arabic, but it is not searchable. It seems that Adobe Acrobat didn't fix the problem, even with their font.

best regards

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