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Participant
February 8, 2021
Question

When copying Persian text there are squares with numbers inside

  • February 8, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 776 views

Hello! I have a problem. I have a file with Persian (Farsi) text, yet if I copy it, then I get following gibberish:  . I tried various solutions like downloading fonts and then copy to Microsoft Word, but it didn't help. Could anyone please help with this?

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1 reply

radzmar
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 9, 2021

This squares are called TOFU and are placeholders since there's no glyph available in your system that matched the copied glyph from the PDF. Keep in mind: There are thousands of languages and much more glyphs used out there in the world. Depending on the font your're using and its coding it can hold information for say 128 characters (ASCII) or 65.536 (UTF-8). This is only in theory. It also depends on which characters the designer of the particular font has embedded into the font file. Free fonts often only contain the typical ASCII characters used in english speaking regions. Other characters that may be used in Europe or Asia are often missing. There's propbaly nothing you can do about this in Reader.