Acrobat 8 adds extra characters to the running header

Believe it or not, this problem STILL EXISTS, years and several Acrobat updates later.  Thank you for all the good ideas to try. An annoying problem!!

I had the same problem with Acrobat X Pro. In my case the STYLEREF tag was wrong. Reason: Some day I changed the name of my heading stylesheets. No problem within word but after converting it to pdf I got these nice extra characters... Using the new stylesheet name within the STYLEREF tag did the trick ;-)

Just in case anyone has the same problem for the same reason.

Best

Chris

I was getting the same problem today when using a styleref in my document headers.

Thanks to reading this thread I resolved it by running the Adobe updater (now on Acrobat 8.1.7), removing "all caps" from my font effects, and ensuring the style reference was in the correct case.

Specs:

Windows XP virtual machine

Office 2003

Adobe Acrobat 8

I will put my $0.02 worth in here.

I have had the "0B" characters appearing in the headers for several versions of Acrobat.

In my case, I was using the Word "StyleRef" field code to automatically put text formatted in Word's "Heading 1" style into my page headers.

Somehow, additional words got appended to the Heading 1 style name. So instead of this heading style being simply named  "Heading 1," the style name was changed to "Heading 1, (103) Heading... ."

I modified the Heading 1 style name back to be simply "Heading 1" and the 0B character problem has gone away.

First, I want to thank other posters for the information in this folder. It saved a lot of wasted time.

Second, here's my experience. In the business I am working for, we were using Acrobat 7 and upgraded this month to Acrobat X. We use Acrobat to create PDFs out of Word files - doc format - created in Word 2007.

PDF files created last month took a while to process but were character perfect. The new software generated the extra characters in the running headers - at least it was quicker! After several home grown efforts to work out what was happening and how to fix it, I went to the web and found this folder. (Thank you, Google.)

Third, here's the (simple) workaround that my boss and I perfected.

ONE

Go to the first running header - the first one that attracts the extra, unwanted, characters.

SECOND

In the header, immediately to the right of the STYLEREF field, insert a CROSS REFERENCE. Cross refer to the NUMBER of the chapter heading. For example, if the first chapter is "1 An Introduction to Widgets", the cross reference is just to the "1".

THIRD

Format that cross reference to be invisible - ie, white font on a white background. [If you prefer, you can format it to be bright red to remind you it's there while you test the workaround.]

That's it. Generate your PDF and, hopefully, the extra characters will no longer be there. It worked for us.

Note: the documents we tried this with had several chapters and therefore several running headers. But we only needed to put in this cross reference to the first affected header. That makes it a quick and simple fix, although everyone accepts it shouldn't be necessary.

Why does it work? Now that's a good question.

Given I know how frustrating this bug is, I sincerely hope the workaround is effective elsewhere.

For the record, this issue isn't just with explicit StyleRef use.  I am having the same iss

ue outside of the running headiers using linked datepicker objects that are idividually formatted.  See: http://library.msstate.edu/content/templates/09otd/docs/Word%202007%20automated%20templates.zip

I have created these templates to help Graduate Students meet our University's formatting requirements.  Given how the date format requirements differ for the Title Page, Copyright Page, and Abstract Page, I opted to use linked date-pickers to automate the process a bit.  Unfortunately when you use PDFMaker in Word, the extra characters appear on the copyright and abstract page dates,and the formatting is not applied.  Copyright page should just be yyyy and the Abstract page should be MMMM d, yyyy.  I am really trying hard to find a solution other than removing the content control completely, but I seem to have no other choice.  (I have tried redoing this using styleref, only to get the same issue).  I am shocked at how long this has been an issue with acrobat.

I had the same issue with 0B 1B ... etc being added with both Acrobat 8 and 9.3.1.

After spending a couple of hours on this I noticed that this only happens with STYLEREF fields placed in a "text box" in the header. If you are using word's default templates you will most likely have this kind of header-textbox-styleref combination. Any change in this combination solves the bug. More strangely, the bug is also solved by adding an inline STYLEREF field in addition to the existing textbox-styleref!!!

So to make the long story short, the follwoing worked for me

Either

A - In the header click inside the textbox and copy the STYLEREF field. Delete the text box then paste the STYLEREF field as an inline field (i.e., without a textbox).

OR

B- In the header click inside the textbox and copy the STYLEREF field. Keep the text box unchanged. Place the cursor in the header line (outside the textbox) and paste the STYLEREF field inline. Select this inline field and format its font to be "hidden" (you may need to add dummy characters before and after the styleref field prior to changing its font to prevent the rest of the header from disappearing)

Hope this works for you

--saeed

I recently had to distill a completed project, and naturally ran into this problem again.

So I thought I'd renew this thread - been three months since the last post, it's a new year, and maybe with it we can hope for a  fix, right?!

To confirm what annew1 was saying, we have always had lowercase in our documents (footers actually), and still  the 0B or whatever extra characters show up. Have gotten used to the two-pass method of creating PDFs. Thanks, all, for the info posted.

I use Acrobat 8.0 Professional (CS3 suite) and Word 2003 with SP3 on Windows XP.

I've had this problem with running headers for a while (since upgrading from v7 to v8). Here are the workarounds I used up to yesterday before I discovered all these posts..

1. ZWAdobe style inserted in the Word doc, this only happened once when I allowed Acrobat to save the Word doc before continuing with the conversion to PDF. It took a long time to repair the doc. I always save in Word before starting a conversion and have never (fingers crossed!) had the problem again.
2. Deleting the unwanted characters in the PDF using TouchUp Text tool - sometimes this worked and by inserting spaces, the header lined up OK; other times the header moved out of alignment and I had to play with the character/word spacing - sometimes this worked, sometimes not.
   Eventually I stopped using Styleref for running headers and entered the text manually in the Word docs.

Since reading these posts I have tried 2 of the workarounds.

1. I use Word built-in headers so I created custom headers (eg h1 instead of Heading 1) and these work. However this will mean changing all my docs and templates to use custom heading styles.
2. Create one PDF with bad headers then create a second PDF by printing to AdobePDF. Then replace the pages in the first PDF with those in the second. This works fine and it's quick, bookmarks are created OK - I'll continue to use this method and version 8 until Adobe fixes the problem though either I'll have retired before then or my company will have switched to Office 2007 and I'll use the built-in PDF converter as described in previous posts.  Take note Adobe.
   
   Thanks to users for all this info.