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AdrienneMASmith
Known Participant
July 17, 2016
Question

Aren't there glyphs in Acrobat Pro?

  • July 17, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 1630 views

They are a main point in forms & applications. I was amazed that I could not find a menu of characters. Heck, I do in Microsoft word!

How Pro is Acrobat Pro?

[Moved from the general, non-support forum Lounge to a product-specific support forum - Mod]

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Dov Isaacs
Legend
July 17, 2016

To augment, the response from Bernd Alheit, PDF is a final form file format, not a document format that maintains context of the contents such as articles, columns, words, paragraphs, sentences, and words. The “editing” capabilities of Acrobat are meant primarily for “text touch-up” or minor corrections, not for document composition. As such, most of the tools you would expect in a full-blown document editor are not provided in Acrobat. If you need to access special characters within Acrobat, you could use operating system utilities such as Character Map in Windows (or comparable software on MacOS) to input characters not available from the keyboard.

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
Janus Bahs Jacquet
Inspiring
August 6, 2019

A character palette is a necessary tool for text touch-up. If a PDF was created using a stylistic set of a font – say, one with a single-storey ɑ instead of a double-storey a – and you just need to fix a typo in a single word in Acrobat, you’re SOL. You can’t even copy the glyph from a program that does understand stylistic alternates, because that just ignores the alternate and pastes a regular a.

The notion that letters are inherently a “document composition” thing not suitable for a tool meant to touch up text and add minor corrections is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

Bernd Alheit
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 17, 2016

Acrobat is not an editor, like Word, InDesign