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Question

Acrobat 8 adds extra characters to the running header

Forum|Forum|19 years ago
December 4, 2006
83 replies
44858 views

I'm using Acrobat 8 Standard on an XP machine with Office 2003. My documents use running headers and footers. Both headers and footers derive their content from the document properties or the heading level. When I create a PDF using Acrobat 8, it's adding extra characters to the running headers. For example:

0BContents
8BSystem Requirements

Updating the field doesn't help. Does anyone have any ideas?

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M

M0thman55

Participant

For the record and for what it’s worth, I have the same problem here-USA, Maryland. It does not happen all the time. I see it in documents that have serious style issues that I haven't had time to repair.

I routinely work with (that’s INHERIT) tons of documents that have been around for years and that are styles/layout/direct formatting nightmares; in my experience, this is one of the “kisses of death” in creating a PDF from a Word document with styles/formatting resulting from a “little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing”… When I create a doc from scratch and format it correctly, I don’t see this.

For the record, I am currently running Windows XP SP 2; Word/Office 2003 Professional SP3 and Acrobat 8 Professional 8.1.6. This has been happening for over a year; previously it happened with Acrobat 8 Standard, too.

Just like other users have noted, once the PDF file has been created, the Word file contains the ZWAdobeF 1 point font and the 0B and 5B text additions mentioned.

I suspected it had something to do with the mucked-up numbering that was applied to the heading styles since I know I need to perform some serious CPR on the files, but my daily miracles are limited. Then I discovered that the ZWAdobeF 1 point is not only on outline numbered headings, it is added to lines of normal and body text. I will need to see if there is any sort of “hosed” direct formatting hiding in those areas…

G

greyowl7

Known Participant

Hi

I've had the same problem with several versions of Adobe PDF Maker, but not with all documents.

Some of your reported experiences led me to look more carefully at my StyleRefs (which worked fine in Word). I discovered in some docs I had a difference in case between the Word style name and the (manually entered) StyleRef entry. In particular (I also use German Word, as CN [Post 55] and Levis [post 68]) and had entered "überschrift 1" instead of "Überschrift 1".

Correcting the case of the StyleRef solved my problem!

Of course I don't know if this is a general solution, but it might help someone...

Viktor

M

MBodner

Participant

I experienced the same problem.

Our Header Style is set to "All Caps" and in acrobat 8 and 9 the hidden characters appear before the styleref translation.

Seeing your post i removed the "All Caps" font treatment of the header and lo and behold the characters disappeared.

Any ideas how i can leave work around this problem and still have an all caps style?

Thanks

L

lklawrie

Participant

That -- correcting the actual case of the style ref value may have fixed it for me. I will play with being able to display those in all caps too as it looks a bit better in the headers than the upper lower.

For the Adobe person that said "they'd never heard of that before" -- tell them to refer to case # 0172965630 (it was automatically closed but they never fixed the problem or even identified it). (You won't be able to see the case but Adobe support should be able to!)

Linda

T

TomQA8766227

Participating Frequently

Alan,

For those of us that are macro illiterate, please describe what it does.

Thanks for sharing it with all of us.

-Tom

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_Alan_McConville_

Participant

Once the characters are in a document it's hard to remove them without affecting links. With the ZWAdobeF font embedded in the document other systems cannot render the Word file and installing the font elsewhere would cause licensing issues. I've used the following macro to replace instances of the font with something more portable using a character which does not appear onscreen/in print.

Sub killAdobeZWQuick()
Selection.GoTo What:=wdGoToPage, Which:=wdGoToNext, Name:="1"
Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Font.Name = "ZWAdobeF"
.text = "^?"
.Replacement.text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Dim i As Long: i = 0
Do Until 1 <> 1
' Find the font
Selection.Find.Execute
If Selection.Find.found = True Then
i = i + 1
Selection.Font.Name = "Arial"
Selection.Font.Size = 1
Selection.text = ChrW(Val("&H206F"))
Else
Exit Do
End If
Loop
MsgBox ("Fixed " & CStr(i) & " Characters")
End Sub

The code has no warranty with it or a license, it's an example of what can be done. If you use it you do so at your own risk. It will probably not work for non "western" font pages.

T

TomQA8766227

Participating Frequently

Since we know PDFMaker corrupts Word .docx, has anyone tried Nitro PDF or another converter?

A

Anonymous

Happy New Year 2009, and the problem still isn't fixed in Acrobat 9.

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_Levis_Ekpil_

Participant

fix it?

I think I was successful.
removed all the old and wrong Styleref entries like (STYLEREF=1) and so on and replaced them by the correct value

STYLEREF "Überschrift 1" \* MERGEFORMAT

there are no wrong characters in the pdfs created after that.
I do not know if this is the final solution, but it seem to work.

Levis

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_Levis_Ekpil_

Participant

Hi Inge,

unfortunately there is no Adobe solution for the "extra character problem.
After six months of waiting and research we decided to use alternative products which understand Word 2007 docs, generate bookmarks and do not crash. Try "PDF-T-Maker" (free plugin) and a postscript printer driver to produce ps-files and convert the ps-files by your adobe distiller or an alternative product.

Regards

Levis

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_Inge_Lederer_

Participant

Hi there. I have Acrobat 9.01 Professional. I'm getting that rotten 'extra character' problem in running headers. I've tried most of the suggestions here that I understood, though the file is still really buggered. Does anyone have any advanced news on the problem?
I'm running Vista, and Word 2007 with Acro Pro 9.01. All updates are on.
Chees, Inge.

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_Gary_Pavek_

Participant

One other thing - I noticed when the document had the orphaned tags, that the "Update Field" context menu option was disabled for the TOC, as was described in this post: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3434529.php

I also should mention that I just tried to duplicate the problem and I couldn't find the magic moment at which to interrupt the process -- it may be due to the fact that I re-ran PDFMaker so many times and made small changes to conversion settings throughout. I forgot to mention that at one point the borders disappeared from the Bookmark checkboxes on the Acrobat PDFMaker window's Bookmarks tab. The checkboxes were still there, and could be checked or unchecked, but the borders were missing.

--Gary Pavek

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