Acrobat 8 adds extra characters to the running header

AMIT - I have some information that may help your developers research this issue.

READERS WHO HAVE THIS PROBLEM - See the end of this post for how I cleaned up my Word document when this happened to me. It's easy to do if you know what to search for.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION:
I have Acrobat 8 Professional and ran into the type of problem described in the thread: Acrobat adding strange characters to the source document, which also show up in the PDF.

In a Word document, I ran PDFMaker (menu option: Adobe PDF > Convert to Adobe PDF) several times in a row, after making small changes to the Level value for several of the headings and styles I had selected as bookmarks on the Bookmark tab, or to the document styles themselves.

During one of these PDFMaker runs, I clicked Cancel while it was processing because I realized I had made an error in my settings. After it stopped, I made some changes to the settings, then ran PDFMaker again several times, but did not look at the bookmarks in the PDF.

Eventually I noticed some odd number/letter combinations at the beginning of the names of the bookmarks in the PDF. I also found these combinations in the document itself -- the appeared when I reset the paragraph styles and cleared the character formatting.

Once I saw them in the document, I started researching. Eventually I realized that PDFMaker had added them to the document in 1 pt ZWAdobeF font, and that PDFMaker must use the combination of size and style to embed codes that identify bookmarks and headings.

PROBABLE CAUSE OF PROBLEM:
I realized that in normal circumstances, PDFMaker adds these codes to the document, uses them to build the PDF, then strips the codes from the document, and we never see them. Since I had interrupted PDFMaker when I canceled, it failed to remove the codes from the source document. When I ran PDFMaker again, it did not realize that the codes already existed in the document, so it added a second set -- and the original set ended up as part of the bookmark names, because the bookmark names don't use the character styles that hid them in the document.

HOW TO DUPLICATE:
The key to duplicating the problem appears to be canceling the PDFMaker after it has created the bookmark codes. Somewhere in the cycle after canceling, it failed to delete the codes it created.

In case it ends up being significant, I was including only Headings 1-5, Title, Chapter Title, and TOC Heading as bookmarks. Only Title was set at Level 1. Headings 1-5 were set to Level 2-6, Chapter Titles was set at Level 2, and TOC Heading was set a Level 3. When the problem occurred, I believe I also have had "Convert Word Bookmarks" checked but I can't recall for sure when I unchecked that box.

TO CLEAN AN AFFECTED WORD DOCUMENT:
I had to search for and delete all instances where Font Size = 1, and then did a second search for Font Name = ZWAdobeF.

Once I deleted all the orphaned tags, I could re-run PDFMaker on the document with no problems and no more funky bookmarks or wonky headings.

This repair strategy will probably work in other types of documents.

Note: If you have changed the font size or font name since the problem appeared, this strategy won't work. In that case, try spell-checking the source document, which should locate most of the orphaned codes. Another option would be to try and cancel the

--Gary Pavek

Thanks, Amit. Or is it Admit?
Heh heh heh... sorry, I just had to! :o)

We have done some work in this area and it would be good if you could send the problematic files. Please ensure to remove any confidential information before you do so.

Thanks
Amit
avats@adobe.com

The workaround for this problem is very simple. Simply close the Word file after the PDF is created without making further edits. This will prevent any extra characters from sneaking in. I have been doing this for several months now and it works fine.

If you do find extra characters from previous conversions, you have to remove them in Word. They can be hard to spot, but if you open the Bookmarks pane in Acrobat Reader you'll see where they are.

Steve

A beautiful example of Arrogance and Ignorance walking hand in hand.
-DeNelo

I am running Acrobat 8 Prof/word 2007 in German. The problem is still the same.
Some weeks ago I contacted the Adobe Support.
They NEVER heard of this problem, I seems to be new to them.
Finally they did not solve the problem.
Here are their last answers:

>Wie meine Kollegen mir mitteilten, tritt der Fehler der Style-Refs >mit den von Ihnen angehängten Dateien auch bei Acrobat 9 auf. Ein >Upgrade wäre daher nicht von Vorteil.
>Allerdings tritt der Fehler wohl nur bei einigen bestimmten >Style->Ref-Einstellungen auf.
>Eventuell könnten Sie die Einstellungen der Style-Refs ändern und >testen, ob der Fehler hier auch auftritt?
>Mit freundlichen Grüßen
>XXXXXX
>Adobe Technical Support

and later on
>uns liegen keine Informationen darüber vor, inwiefern das >Entwickler-Team versuchen wird, eventuell ein Patch oder in einer >neuen Acrobat-Version Style-Ref-Funktionen zu übernehmen.

Translated summary:

> .. the problem is still the same with Acrobat 9, an update will not solve the problem
> it occurs only with some styleref settings
> change your styleref settings and test it by yourself

and later on

> we have no information, if the developer team will solve the problem by a patch or in a new Acrobat release.

Our, in my words:
Try it by yourself and don´t contact us again.

I have run a test under the Word 2007 + Acrobat 9 Pro environment. I used customized Word style as a basis to create PDF bookmark. It appears that Acroabt is still inserting irrelevant characters into the running headers.

Unfortunately we cannot modify the customized Word styles into standard Word style names (we are talking about over 50 word styles here). Looks like we would have to stick with Acrobat 7 to avoid this problem :(

I have the same problem in the USA. We also experience it in our Spain offices. I believe it only happens when you StyleRef to styles with custom names. I.E. if you can live with the built-in heading styles and their default names, you may not experience the problem. -- Bear

I work in Israel and someone told me that this problem is not an international one and this is why Adobe is not aware/acknowledging this issue.

Can people please post where you work so I can get an idea of this problem really is an international one or not?

Thanks!

HERE IS THE SOLUTION :-) :-) :-)

First: I have recently moved over to MAC a great idea that makes me ...

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3, Word 2007 Professional Service Pack 1 and Acrobat 8.1.2 run only in a virtual machine environment :-)

Very important: I am a GERMAN (!) user. The problem is the german umlaut "Ü" from the style "Überschrift 1" (engl. "Heading 1").

1. Right click (in the document) on heading with style "Überschrift 1". Select "Style sheet" and than select "Save choice as new fast style sheet". A good new name is "H1" with no german umlaut.

2. Do (1) in all ranks, e.g. rename "Überschrift 2" to "H2". Do not use "Überschrift 1", "Überschrift 2", in the whole document!

3. Refresh your table of contents; it works fine!

4. Now you have to change your styleref fields from "Überschrift 1" to "H1" and so on.

5. Convert doc(x) to pdf.

6. Result works fine. Do not deactivate bookmarks option!

@Adobe: Only idiots are

Greets
CN

PS: I had the inspiration from "Marta Cepek - 1:17pm Feb 11, 08 PST (#45 of 54)"
PPS: Another problem is, that "Oktoberfest" in Munich ends in 3 days ;-)