Acrobat X Pro does not recognize system font

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
August 13, 2013
2 replies
17902 views

I scanned a document to pdf, opened it in Acrobat X Pro and then applies OCR to the image by clicking Edit in the OCR dialogue and chose ClearScan. I then went to edit the text, but when I clicked on a selection, a TouchUp dialogue box popped up stating, “All or part of the selection has no available system font. You cannot add or delete text using the currently selected font.” The font used in the document was Arial 10 pt. Does Acrobat not recognize that font? Is there any way to edit this pdf's text?

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W

Whispering_loyalty1549

Participant

I had the same issue - if you don't use bold/italic variants, you can substitute with ArialUnicode, works fine for me.

B

Bill12

Inspiring

For some reason, Adobe uses a different font for the ClearScan OCR. You might try to repeat the process with Searchable text OCR. Of course, you will not see the text on the screen. However, you can save it to DOC and possibly recreate the PDF from there. At least, I have found success that way. A ClearScan OCR can not be saved to DOC for the same font reason. I have no clue why they did this font choice, rather than using system fonts. You can check the fonts used by ctrl-D>font tab.

J

jmt111Author

Inspiring

I checked the fonts via ctrl D | Fonts tab. It indicates Arial, Helvitica and other fonts that, to my knowledge, are system fonts. The specific text I am trying to edit is in Arial font. I am therefore confused as to why Acrobat indicates that the font is not on my system.

I thought that perhaps the slight pixelation resulting from my scanner was throwing Acrobat off, but Acrobat appears to recognize that the font is indeed Arial.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

I am certain that the font is Arial because in the test I ran, I created the original file in Word and assigned Arial to the text I was later trying to edit in Acrobat.

Based on this and other tests I ran, I conclude that Acrobat does not allow users to edit the foreground text of OCRed files. I believe this is a security measure: Acrobat assumes that if a user must run OCR to access the text in a file, then he does not have access to the original file and therefore should not be given rights to edit the text. However, if the text is recognizable in a pdf without needing to run OCR, then Acrobat is not very particular about protecting the text because if the pdf creator wanted to protect the text, he probably would have restricted the file or not allowed the text to be recognizable to begin with.

I don't quite understand. You talk about ...font used in Word... and also OCR?

If it is made from Word you can't OCR.

If it is made by OCR the font is a guess and you cannot say it will be Arial because the scan used Arial.

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