Acrobat Accessibility: Characters in a text object cannot be mapped to Unicode

[Morten38294782o22u]

Hi there,

As part of my job, I am performing tagging in Acrobat Pro. As I was checking my document in PAC2021, the error message 'Characters in a text object cannot be mapped to Unicode' showed itself. I have no idea how to fix this issue.

Any help is received with great gratitude 🙂

Kind Regards,

Morten

[Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted solution]

This is very likley a font issue. A "good" font will have a "toUnicode" table that allows you to map a glyph (the "drawing" of one or more characters) back to the Unicode codes involved. For standard characters that is pretty straight forward, but you also have to consider ligatures, where one glyph actually represents more than one character. Without that table, it's impossible to perform that mapping. 

[morten_7701]

Dear Karl,

Thank you for your answer. I'm still not quite sure how I fix this issue using Acrobat - are you able to assist me with a guide or something of the sorts? 🙂

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to fix this. In some cases, it's possible that you can fix issues in PDF files using the preflight tool in Adobe Acrobat Pro. If you can, it's easier to just recrete the PDF file using a tool that will create good PDF files. 

[morten_7701]

If I only have the bugged PDF, and not any other version of the file, what then?

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

Go into the preflight tool in Acrobat Pro (e.g. by typing preflight in the tools search field). This should bring up a window that looks like this:

I've marked all the things that should be selected, then type "font" in the search field and select the "Fix potential Font Problems". Then click on the "Analyze and Fix" button at the bottom. 

Again, it's very unlikley that you can fix this issue, but it's worth a try.