special characters don't copy from keyboard

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
November 9, 2025
1 reply
159 views

Dear Adobe community,

I have a question regarding special characters in Adobe Pro. I have the 2020 version and when inserting text, there are a few special characters that don't copy from my keyboard, such as the pipe or the "bigger than". When looking the issue up online, I was told to go to the keystroke combination settings, only that I do not find them in my menu. Is this a version issue or does anyone know how to fix this?

Thank you very much for any pointers!

Correct answer radzmar

You can use so calles ALT-Codes to enter characters. For > just hold the ALT key and enter 62 on the number keys on the right.
https://alt-codes.de

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

You don't mention whether you're working on the Mac or Windows platforms, which would help direct your answer.

Are you able to place the same extended characters, in the same font(s), in another application like Notepad/WordPad on the PC, or TextEdit on the Mac?
When you check the Fonts tab in the Document Properties dialog box (through the File>Properties menu command), are the fonts used in your Acrobat document subsetted?

Those are just a few things, off the top of my head, that would make adding extended characters to an existing Acrobat document a challenge. If you've accounted for all these things, let us know and we can help with some more extraordinary situations that could come into play.

Randy

H

Helen@ProAuthor

Participant

Hello Randy,

I am working off a HP Pavilion Notebook with a German keyboard using Windows 11. The pipe and "bigger than" button share a key with the lower and uppercase L and the "lower than" key. They do work perfectly fine in MS Word but not in the other MS Office applications or the text editor.

When I go to the Fonts tab in the File/Properties menu, it lists the fonts in that document. If I convert a document form Word to PDF, the special characters do transfer but when I want to edit the PDF in Acrobat itself, I cannot "type" them if that makes sense. It might be a keyboard issue as well, as the notebook is rather new but all the other special characters work - If I am not mistaken, there should be a special characters section in Adobe as well (like there is with smybols etc. in Word) but I cannot find it - There's the basic font settings like font type and size, bold, italics etc. but I do not see any buttons, tabs or settings for special characters.

Fun fact: The "larger than" doesn't work in this editor, either - I think the keystroke combinations might be used for other shortcuts but then that would be a Microsoft issue altogether but as I said, they do work in Word, so I am a bit lost - AM I missing something basic here?

My apologies for the confusion, I should have been more cocncrete from the getgo - I have researched the issue online and even though I am pretty sure I'm looking at all the right tabs (because they are in German and not in English), I still don't find what I am looking for.

radzmar

Correct answer

Community Expert

You can use so calles ALT-Codes to enter characters. For > just hold the ALT key and enter 62 on the number keys on the right.
https://alt-codes.de

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