Acrobat accessibility character encoding fail on certain languages, eg Punjabi, Thai, Khmer

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
May 28, 2026
3 replies
64 views

At the agency where I work, we create a lot of PDFs from Indesign that are in other languages. When I use the accessibility checker on these in Acrobat, I've been having a character encoding fail on several languages. They seem to all be ones where the characters include little flourishes either below or above the character – so like Punjabi, or Thai, or Khmer. Typically we use Noto Sans from Google, so it’s definitely unicode, and of course we are using the world-ready composer, and exporting with the correct language assigned. All that required stuff. It’s not solving this.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

E

Eddy Watson

Participant

This is an issue for me also, have you made any progress with resolving the problem/bug? I am using Indesign 21.4.1 and the same problems happen.

Unlike the other bugs introduced into InDesign recently where characters in some of the complex languages don’t compose properly if using variable fonts, this one is a problem with both variable and static fonts

MelMelMelMelAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi @Eddy Watson - no I haven’t found a way to resolve this and no one is replying here so I think they have no idea. The only thing I found that gets rid of the error is turning off the world composer, but obviously that isn’t a solution because then the text is displayed incorrectly. It’s definitely some sort of ligature problem. I keep having to deliver files to clients even though they throw up that error and just hope they accept my explanation that it’s a software bug!

Meenakshi0101

Community Manager

Hi MelMelMelMel,

Thank you for sharing the information and recording.

Please allow us some time to check this, and we will share our findings.

Thanks,

Meenakshi

Meenakshi0101

Community Manager

Hi MelMelMelMel,

Thank you for reaching out, and sorry for the trouble caused.

As mentioned, the issue occurs with specific languages. Could you please share the following information so we can share it with the team to check this further:

Share the sample PDF
Acrobat version number.
OS used on the machine
Share the screen recording of what happens when you run the accessibility checker.

Let us know if you have any questions or need help.

Thanks,

Meenakshi

MelMelMelMelAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for reaching out @Meenakshi0101

I’ve recreated this issue in a separate document, since the original is government work and I can’t share it.

I’m using InDesign 21.2 to create the source document and exporting as an Interactive PDF (although the same thing happens if I export as a non-interactive PDF).

I’m on MacOS 26.4

PDF and screen recording are attached.

Thanks!

Test PDF.pdf

Screen Recording 2026-06-01 at 9.30.02 am.mov

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.