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Inspiring
February 25, 2022
Answered

Acrobat Pro / Reader DC: Cannot copy-paste German umlauts into comments

  • February 25, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 3086 views

Hi everyone, I've got a rather strange but extremly troubling problem:


In Acrobat (Pro or Reader) DC, when copying and pasting a word containing the German umlaut characters Ä,Ö,Ü,ä,ö,ü or an ß the characters will be transformed into A,O,U,a,o,u and s upon pasting them if certain other characters are present that use the same font face. We have seen this problem across different OSes, in Acrobat Pro DC as well as Acrobat Reader DC. This issue is causing us extreme trouble, since we are handling thousands of hundreds pages long documents where we need to use the PDF commenting tools for adding corrections.

 

Does anyone here have the same problem and / or a solution? Thanks a lot!

 

System:
OS: Windows 10 Enterprise 20H2, Build 19042.1526
OS-Language: German
InDesign / Acrobat Application Language: German

 

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start InDesign 17.1 x64 (currently in use, error was reproducible with previous versions back to 15)
2. Open a default New Document
3. Add a text frame
4. Add any or all of the following common German words

 

Änderung
Öfen
Überblick

Käse
Kröte
Blüte

Maß
groß
Gruß

mäßigen
größer
grüßen

 

AND add one or all of these characters:

 

≥ (Greater-than-or-equal-to-sign)
⁰ (Superscript zero)
σ (Greek small letter Sigma)
⅞ (Vulgar fraction seven eights)

 

(This list is by far from exhaustive, I've observed many more "problematic" characters...)

 

5. Export PDF with any of the PDF-Presets PDF/X-4:2010, PDF/X-3:2002, PDF/X-3:2001, PDF/X-1a:2001 , PDF/X-1a:2002 (again, this is not exhaustive by any means, but I've stuck to the presets for conformance and reproducibility)

6. Open the exported PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (currently in use: 2021.011.20039) oder Adobe Acrobat Reader (currently in use: 2021.011.20039)
7. Open the PDF commenting tools
8. Double Click one of the words to select it
9. Press Ctrl + C (PC) or Cmd + C (Mac) to copy
10. Press Ctrl + V (PC) or Cmd + V (Mac) to paste

 

Result: Ä,Ö,Ü,ä,ö,ü and ß will not paste correctly


Suspected cause:
Acrobat is unable to handle the simultaneous existence of Ä,Ö,Ü,ä,ö,ü, ß and ≥ OR ⁰ OR σ OR ⅞ (or many others) within the same font face when pasting text.

 

Indication that it's not related to third party fonts:
The testing was done with Minion Pro default font.

 

Indication that it's related to font face:
Go back to InDesign, change font face for the ≥ / ⁰ / σ / ⅞ to Minion Pro Bold and repeat steps 5 to 9. The Ä,Ö,Ü,ä,ö,ü and ß will now paste correctly. If you change any of the words to Minion Pro Bold, the error will re-occur.

 

Indication that it's a pasting error specific to Adobe Acrobat Pro/Reader:
Pasting the word copied in step 8 works perfectly fine in other applications like MS Word, Google Chrome Browser, and even InDesign or Photoshop.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Amal.

Hi there

 

Hope you are doing well and sorry to keep you waiting.

 

The new version 22.1.20085 is now available for Adobe Acrobat/Reader DC.

Please update the application from the help menu > Check for updates and reboot the computer once and see if that helps.

 

For more info about the new version please check the help page https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/adobe-acrobat-and-reader-march-2022-updates-are-l...

 

Regards

Amal

2 replies

Amal.
Amal.Correct answer
Legend
March 9, 2022

Hi there

 

Hope you are doing well and sorry to keep you waiting.

 

The new version 22.1.20085 is now available for Adobe Acrobat/Reader DC.

Please update the application from the help menu > Check for updates and reboot the computer once and see if that helps.

 

For more info about the new version please check the help page https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/adobe-acrobat-and-reader-march-2022-updates-are-l...

 

Regards

Amal

Inspiring
March 10, 2022

Hi Amal,

thank you very much, I will try that as soon as possible.

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 25, 2022

The problem is with copying accented characters in general, not specifically pasting it into comments.

The latest versions of Acrobat and Reader has a bug that causes them not to copy those diacritics correctly.

We've been waiting on Adobe to release a fix for this issue for more than a month now...

One possible workaround is to right-click the text and select Copy with Formatting, instead. That seems to fix the issue, in some cases.

 

Inspiring
February 28, 2022

Thanks for your quick reply! Copy with Formatting is unfortunately only present in Acrobat Pro, if I'm not mistaken, so it seems like our more numerous Reader users will have to put up with the issue for the forseable future.

Anyway, it might at least help our Pro users, in the cases when it works.