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MarkWeiss
MarkWeiss
Inspiring
August 6, 2009
Question

Message, "All or part of the selection has no available system font..." when editing text in a PDF file

  • August 6, 2009
  • 2 replies
  • 28188 views

I'm in a bind because a client asked me to update some PDF files that I created on this PC last year, but Acrobat is not allowing me to edit the files.

These files were made from Word documents, but the documents are mysteriously missing from my system, so I cannot edit the masters and publish to PDF. Windows Explorer has been running a search on word strings in the PDF for close to two hours and these missing Word documents that the PDFs are created from are not turning up.

The problem I don't understant is the docs are in Times New Roman, a font that is on this machine and every Windows machine on earth.

I was simply trying to change 2009 to 2010 in the document. I was able to deleted to 00's but any further deletion results in the popup about no available system font.

I already tried the remedy listed in http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/330/330971.html to no avail.

I can't even delete the whole paragraph and retype it. It pops up that I don't have the font. This is absurd! I have Times New Roman on this system. The doc uses all plain, universally available Windows default fonts, so I'm unable to edit this doc and the master Word docs have disappeared. I'll have to roll back to Acrobat 6 to get this work done. Acrobat 8 is just weird!

Before I uninstall Acrobat and go back to 6.x, are there any workarounds to this bug?

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    2 replies

    B
    Bill12
    Inspiring
    August 6, 2009

    It is likely that the PDFs you created did not have the fonts embedded and somehow the font recognition was changed. Anyway, you can likely select some text that needs to be fixed and right click for the properties. Then select the proper font and ask it to embed the font.

    Another option would be to save the PDF as a DOC file and work from there. Extra work, but might be faster and safer in the long run. Editing PDF files is not really good and may actually be more work than recreating the original DOC file. If you work with style sheets, the recreation might actually go fairly fast.

    As far as Acrobat and the problem, do you have a machine available with AA6 that you mentioned? If so, try it there too before you conclude you just need to back up.

    Stix_Hart
    Stix_Hart
    Inspiring
    August 6, 2009

    I try never to have to do what you're doing, so don't know how to fix it, but you could try retyping it with the typewriter tool?  Only problem is when you enable it in Acrobat 8 I think the default font is courier and you can't change it, but if you open it in reader 9 you can.....  What a mess!

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