Skip to main content
Participant
December 28, 2020
Answered

Garbage Characters appearing

  • December 28, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 885 views

Hi.

Iam having issues with multiple systems with the PDF editor.

We have recently upgraded our systems to Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020.

 

  • Opening each file, it displays correctly.
  • Combining several files, there some characters display as a Square character.

 

OS is Windows 10

 

Please advise.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Bernd Alheit

Embed the fonts before you combine the files.

1 reply

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
December 28, 2020

The PDFs showing the white boxes (or scrambled characters) indicate that those PDFs did not have the fonts embedded into the PDF at the time it was created.

 

So Acrobat used a font on your computer and swapped it for the original missing one in the PDFs. And your font doesn't have the characters the PDF is looking for. Hence, the white box/scrambled characters.

 

The best solution is to ask the person who created those PDFs to re-export new PDFs, this time selecting the option to embed the fonts into the PDFs. Here are instructions for doing that from MS Word: Embed fonts into PDF with MS Office 

 

The next best solution is to embed the fonts into the PDF from your computer, but note that there's a good chance you won't have the exact font that was originally used, so the appearance of the PDF's text might change (such as from Helvetica to Arial). Here are the instructions for embedding fonts in Acrobat: Embed fonts into PDF with Adobe Acrobat. 

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
Participant
December 29, 2020

Hi Bevi,

 

Thank you for the above instructions. However, it doesnt seem to work. 

 

 

The complete text now becomes the square/rectangle characters.

 

Bernd Alheit
Community Expert
Bernd AlheitCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
December 29, 2020

Embed the fonts before you combine the files.