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T
teamlcs
Participant
May 19, 2020
Question

Document shows text as symbols (boxes) on some computers

  • May 19, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 2973 views

When one user opens a document in Adobe, she sees normal pages with text, but when multiple other users on different computers open the same documents they see symbols mixed with the text (mostly boxes replacing certain letters). We had this same issue a few months ago and couldn't find any solution that worked online.

2 replies

U
Adobe Employee
user9294671
Adobe Employee
May 26, 2020

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

As already mentioned by @gary_sc this seems to be issue with fonts(fonts are not present).

For further investigating the issue please share the pdf file and the acrobat version you are using.

You can find the version using the steps mentioned below:
Go to Help -> About Adobe Acrobat.

 

Thanks,

Sweta Karn

    T
    teamlcsAuthor
    Participant
    May 28, 2020

    It looks like I was able to open the pdf with Word, then save as another pdf, to turn the symbols back into text.

    The only thing is that opening the pdf in Word might move some stuff around in the document (which you can correct)

     

    I'm not able to share the file at the moment for privacy reasons (also, it's a pretty large file).

    I was hoping to find a solution to prevent this from happening in the first place.

    Thank you for your help! It put me on the right track.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 19, 2020

    Hi Robert

     

    The problem is that when the document was created, it didn't embed the fonts. Becuase of that, when the document is open by someone who has the font(s), everything will be fine but when opened by someone who doens't have the font(s), they see the squares.

     

    Unfortnatley I do not belive this can be fixed after the fact (but I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong on that). ;>)

      T
      teamlcsAuthor
      Participant
      May 28, 2020

      It looks like I was able to open the pdf with Word, then save as another pdf, to turn the symbols back into text.

      The only thing is that opening the pdf in Word might move some stuff in the document (which you can correct)

       

      I was hoping to find a solution to prevent this from happening in the first place.

      Thank you for your help! It put me on the right track.

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