Acrobat displays squares instead of narrow letter combinations (such as "ff", "ft", "lf", "fl")

[JonasKuehn]

Hello,

I have a problem with Acrobat Pro, Continuous Release Version 2022.003.20310 (32-bit, used on a Windows 10 computer).

Whenever I try to copy-paste texts with words containing combinations of narrow letters such as "ff", "ft", "fl", or "lf" out of Acrobat Pro, the pasted text contains small squares (looking like "▯") instead of those letter combinations. No matter whether I paste it into a browser form, an Editor or Word document or an Excel sheet. The bug exists independently from the target medium.

This is very time consuming, because I have to copy paste many of those texts into online forms and I always have to check the whole text, word by word, for those display bugs. In the German language such letter combinations are quite popular and a 300-word text takes me about 5 minutes to check it instead of just copy-pasting it.

Is this a commonly known issue and is there a fix for that?

Kind regards

Jonas Kuehn

[try67 · Accepted solution]

This form of double-glyph is called a "ligature". The issue is most likely that the font used in the file has a unique encoding for these characters (instead of using the common unicode values for them), so when you copy them to another format they come out appearing incorrectly. There's really not much that can be done about it, unless you re-create the file using a better font. Alternatively, you could probably locate those codes and do a search & replace command in the application you're copying the text to, to replace them with the actual text, but that would require some technical know-how.

[JonasKuehn]

Hey try67,

thanks for the info - that is alerady very helpful!

The PDF documents are created by our Formcycle XIMA software which we use to build all kinds of forms.

I will try to find a solution together with out XIMA administrator - should be possible! 🙂

Kind regards

Jonas