Acrobat PDF has text showing as blank squares

[Frankie31854870oauo]

Hello all,

One of our users is coming across an Acrobat issue that happens across multiple documents.

When they open some PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, some of the text gets turned into blank squares. The PDF works totally fine for the user in Google Chrome, and the PDF also works totally fine for me in my instance of Adobe Acrobat.

User opening the PDF in their Acrobat:

Me opening the same PDF in my Acrobat (some info redacted for privacy):

The font appears to be Arial, so it's not a strange font that I have downloaded that the user doesn't. 

I have discovered that using Save as other -> Optimized PDF produces a fixed PDF for the user. However, this is not something I need to do in my instance of Adobe Acrobat. The documents that are problematic for the user in his Acrobat work fine for me without any action.

So far, I have tried using AcroCleaner for the user, rebooting, then re-installing a fresh version of Acrobat 64 bit.

I also tried un-checking "Save As optmizes for Fast Web View" in Edit > Preferences > Documents. However, the issue persists.

Are there any other setting changes or fixes we could potentially try for this issue? Thank you! 

[Jason28277637pqli]

same issue.  it appears to be with acrobat dc for us.  2020 adobe acrobat opens the files fine.  they are files from a hospital.  opening in edge/chrome/firefox works and if we reprint using microsoft print to pdf it from the browser it will show the characters.  so odd and annoying.  we have tried all the googlefoo with check boxes from prefrences but nothing pops.

[Frankie31854870oauo]

Our users also are mainly experiencing this issue when opening files from hospitals.

Similarily, opening the PDF in any browser works, and using Microsoft Print to PDF also fixes the PDF. 

It's just the original PDF has the broken characters in the newest version of 64-bit Acrobat it seems, since the PDFs display correctly in my less up-to-date version of Acrobat. 

[Jake3617721386qv]

Same issue, the PDFs display correctly in any version before 2024.002.21005.

[caryl33260988]

Also having this issue with one of my clients. 50% of the PDFs they work with are sent by hospitals. They are having a really rough time. The PDFs render 100% fine in Edge or Chrome or any other PDF reader program. We are using the latest version of 64bit Acrobat.

[Gregory27004300f44c]

Same issue here. PDF files from a hospital. My client remembers reading the same files without issue a year ago, now they get the squares. Works fine in chrome and edge.  Save as other -> Optimized PDF works ok and will be the workaround until adobe addresses this.

[office_8091]

Hello all,

I was struggling with the same problem for a week now. Not sure if this problem started after the adobe update or after the window update. For our office is happening only with medical records of hospitals. Anyhow I came up with 2 solutions that work for us at least. Both of them are temporarly somehow, because Adobe has to fix this once for all.

1. Open the file with the browser, not with adobe.

2. When in Adobe under All tools select Compress a PDF, select Preflight, PDF fixups, Convert fonts to outlines, Analyze and fix.

I tried to illustrate the steps with pictures. Hopefully this will solve your problem

[Frankie31854870oauo · Accepted solution]

Hello all,

I found something that fixes this issue for some of my users. 

- Close Acrobat

- Update Acrobat to the latest release from the following link - https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNotesDC/index.html (I used the Sept 10, 2024 release) 

- It should update over your existing install

- Then reboot your computer

- PDFs that were problematic before in Acrobat are now displaying correctly