Participant

Question

Acrobat no longer selecting and editing text. Text overlaps itself

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
September 14, 2020
2 replies
2291 views

Hi,

I created a pdf file then turned it into a form. I sent the file off to my client to use in her business. There is one small typo, but I can't fix it. The bounding box is normal and looks like it should be an easy fix, but I can no longer select the text. When I try to place my cursor in the box and type, all the text jumps into a single-spaced area, overlapping itself and becoming unreadable.

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

ACH&6Author

Participant

I am trying to follow Try67's recommendations and acrobat is not allowing me to delete any pages or replace my new pages. The application does nothing when I delete a page and when I attempt to replace a page, I am met with the message "A number is out of range". I am usually very computer savvy and have never had any issues with Acrobat, so I am not sure what is happening.

ls_rbls

Community Expert

I really don't know if try67 recommendation was necessary. He is on the ball though and I understood his intent by recommending that approach. I just don't think this route was necessary.

In any case, according to the Adobe Helpx guidance this is how to fix that:

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/a-number-is-out-of-range-error-viewing-pdf-deleting-pages.html

Going back to your original inquiry I normally resolve issues like this one very easily with the "Edit PDF" tool.

Looking at your screenshot again, I think that all you had to do is grab the right margin of the bounding box and expand it to the right. Moving it further away to the right will enlarge the whole text frame which will allow to also work more comfortably with the text in it.

Also, in your last screenshot note that the "Paragraph spacing" and the "Character spacing" are not set to "0".

ls_rbls

Community Expert

In your second screenshot if you look to the far right margin of that bounding box there is an exclamation mark icon.

Click on it and see if you can get an additional tooltip with instructions.

From the way it looks I can only think of a text box on top of another, or, if you were copying text from a scanned document, or, if there are additional blabk lines or spaces that need to be deleted.

If you were copying and pasting text instead of typing it, delete this text box and create a new one.

Verify that on the document that you're copying text from that you right-click on the selection and choose from the context menu "Copy with Formatting" instead of just "Copy"; then paste it in your PDF and see if this resolves the issue.

And you paste text in that box

A

ACH&6Author

Participant

I had some box pop up saying I had something running in the background and it gave me a couple of options for viewing. I accidentally closed it or I could be more specific.

The little error icon is telling me that my original font is not in place and it will substitute a different font. I was able to increase the spacing of the current box and it stretched the words back out. The spacing is still off though.

try67

Community Expert

You should not edit a PDF file like that. Go back to the original file, make the edits there and then create a new PDF file from it. If you added form fields then use the Replace Pages command on the old version and insert the pages from the new version into it. Your fields, scripts, bookmarks, etc. will remain in tact.

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