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Inspiring
August 13, 2013
Question

Acrobat X Pro does not recognize system font

  • 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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2 replies

Participant
January 3, 2017

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

Inspiring
August 13, 2013

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.

jmt111Author
Inspiring
August 15, 2013

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.

Inspiring
August 19, 2013

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.


To clarify the OCR point. Acrobat OCR can only be run on file pages that are ONLY graphics. If there is any text on the page, you will get a message that the OCR can not be done. That is why we are not sure what you are talking about.

If you created the PDF directly from WORD with the press or print job settings, then the Arial would be transferred and you would be able to edit it. If you printed a DOC file with Arial and then scanned it and ran OCR, the font will probably not be Arial. In fact with ClearScan, the fonts are created on the fly (sure wish they would use the best guess and use a system font).

You may need to describe your work flow to tell us how you created the PDF that you are working on in order for us to tell more. In terms of what fonts are in your PDF, you can check with the font tab from ctrl-D (document properties).