Participant

Question

Text disappearing when tagging

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 18, 2024
2 replies
1484 views

Has anyone seen text disappearing when manually tagging PDFs? I open the accessibility tool, select the text to tag, then click the appropriate tag button, and the text disappears. Anyone seen this? Help?

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Balero98

Participant

This is happening to me to and it’s super frustrating. I’ll manually tag a block of text that is on top of a box background and the text will disappear. I have tried to drag it up in order in the content panel, but it does nothing. It’s still in the document. It just appears to have gone behind the box. I’m on a MacBook Pro M2 using Acrobat Pro version 2026.001.21691. And for the love of Pete, please stop answering a post with questions and when the user answers those questions you never come back. It’s been 2 years since Brian answered you.

Amal Jaiswal

Community Manager

Hi @Balero98,

Hope you are doing well and thanks for jumping back into this thread.

What you're describing, text vanishing behind a background box after tagging, while still showing up in the Tags panel, sounds less like the text actually being deleted and more like a rendering/stacking-order issue that gets triggered specifically when tagging interacts with overlapping content (like a colored box, watermark, or background shape). That's a meaningfully different bug than a generic "reset your preferences" issue.

A few things to try in the meantime, ones that are different from what's already been ruled out:

1. Toggle viewing mode: while in the Tags panel, try switching between "Reading Order" view and the regular Tags tree view to see if the text reappears. If it does, that confirms it's a display glitch, not a content loss.

2. Export and reopen: save a copy of the PDF, close it fully, and reopen it. Some rendering-order bugs only resolve (or get worse) after a fresh render cycle.

3. Isolate the page: if possible, try the same tagging action on a single extracted page (Organize Pages > Extract) to see if it's specific to this document's structure or happens universally on your machine.

Could you confirm the exact PDF source (was it created in Acrobat, exported from Word/InDesign, or scanned), that'll help engineering reproduce it faster.

Thanks for your patience

~Amal

Amal.

Legend

Hi @Brian Stafford

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

Have you started experiencing this issue recently? What is the version of the Acrobat DC you are using? To check the version go to Help > About Acrobat and make sure you have the recent version 23.08.20470 installed. Go to Help > Check for updates and reboot the computer once.

Also try to repair the installation from the help menu (Win Only) and see if that works.

Please try to reset the Acrobat preferences as described here https://adobe.ly/3tQ9MNn and see if that helps.

Let us know how it goes.

~Amal

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Brian StaffordAuthor

Participant

Hello Amal:

Thank you for the reply! Yes, I'm on the current version: 23.08.20470

I checked for updates, and none are available.

On Windows, I ran the "Repair" command for Acrobat.

I removed the Preferences folder as described here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/how-to-reset-acrobat-preference-settings-to-default/td-p/4792082?linkId=100000236536274

Despite all of this, I am still experiencing the exact same issue of text disappearing when I select and tag a portion of the document's content.

Other ideas?

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