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December 17, 2025
Answered

Numbers turns to squares when converting PDF to word. (Chinese Document)

  • December 17, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 160 views

I'm translating a bunch of documents of my company's documents from English to Chinese and I'm met with this problem, here's my usual workflow.

 

  1. Open PDF in Adobe Express. Translate texts from English to Chinese. Download translated PDF.(Numbers still normal at this point)
  2. Open translated PDF in Acrobat Pro (numbers still normal) and convert to word.
  3. Open Word. All numbers become boxes.

 

I have made sure to use a font that is both compatible in adobe express and word. In my journey to fix it I found two things.

  1. If I changed the font of the numbers from a Chinese font to a roman font like Calibri in Adobe Express, download the translated PDF and convert it to Word, the problem goes away.
  2. When I open the PDF in Adobe inDesign and apparently all the numbers (that have become squares) is detected to be in Times New Roman.

Anybody got an idea? I still have a few documents left to do, and I can't waste my time changing all the font of the numbers. (Some document got lots of numbers)

Correct answer radzmar

The TOFU (▯) character is generally the result of a missing character in the font used in the PDF. This can be happen when the font isn't embedded in the initial PDF and so the character get's lost in the conversion process. It sometimes can be replaced with a visually suitable surrogate or the ▯ if this wasn't possible. It also can be, that there's initially no font information available in the first place, so the file converter has no idea of what the character means. PDFs were designed to keep the visual appearance of a document. There's no guarantee the underlying logical structure of the texts are kept and so editing PDF can be really a pain. It's better to use a word processor like Word oder InDesign to create documents in the desired languages you then finally save as PDFs instead of converting exitings PDFs back and forth. 

1 reply

radzmar
Community Expert
radzmarCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
December 17, 2025

The TOFU (▯) character is generally the result of a missing character in the font used in the PDF. This can be happen when the font isn't embedded in the initial PDF and so the character get's lost in the conversion process. It sometimes can be replaced with a visually suitable surrogate or the ▯ if this wasn't possible. It also can be, that there's initially no font information available in the first place, so the file converter has no idea of what the character means. PDFs were designed to keep the visual appearance of a document. There's no guarantee the underlying logical structure of the texts are kept and so editing PDF can be really a pain. It's better to use a word processor like Word oder InDesign to create documents in the desired languages you then finally save as PDFs instead of converting exitings PDFs back and forth. 

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