Skip to main content
A
Anna38642881pflo
Participant
July 23, 2024
Answered

Editing text box deletes letters

  • July 23, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 671 views

Hello! I've been using Adobe Acrobat to convert web page forms into PDF forms - printing the pages in browser to save them as PDFs and then opening them in Acrobat and using the form creation tool. However,  trying to make any edits to text boxes deletes every instance of the letters "fi" in sequence.


Before:
After (note le instead of file, con dential instead of confidential):
While trying to edit the read order of the text, I've also noticed that even if I don't touch the text boxes, "fi" is not recognized as text by the program, so it reads out "original le" even if the text displays as "original file".

 

Editing text boxes also changes the spacing and alignment of all text in the box, though I recognize that may be an unavoidable part of the conversion. Still, if there's a way to circumvent this, it would be very helpful!

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer try67

The "fi" is probably a ligature, which is a single character that contains two letters (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)). If not encoded correctly it can appear as an image, instead of a letter. Hence the issues you're having with it. But the real solution needs to be to edit the original file used to create the PDF, not the static contents of the PDF file itself, as these files were never meant to be edited in this way.

1 reply

try67
Community Expert
try67Community ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
July 24, 2024

The "fi" is probably a ligature, which is a single character that contains two letters (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)). If not encoded correctly it can appear as an image, instead of a letter. Hence the issues you're having with it. But the real solution needs to be to edit the original file used to create the PDF, not the static contents of the PDF file itself, as these files were never meant to be edited in this way.

A
Anna38642881pfloAuthor
Participant
July 24, 2024

Thanks for the response! Just confirming, this means that the only way to fix this is by editing the web page, ie. there's nothing I can do with the PDF to prevent this issue?

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices