Assistive technology problem with Khmer font

[Hayley513]

Hi there, 

I create healthcare documents in a variety of languages that must be reviewed for accessibility for screen reader users before publishing. I have run into a problem with a document translated into Khmer (Cambodian) - this was created in Word and then saved as a PDF, but this problem is happening even when I create documents from scratch in Adobe. [I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro - version 2023.006.20380]

The font looks perfect on the PDF page, but in the content tool, the text in the containers is showing up interspersed with diamond question mark characters: �. According to my accessibility team, these characters will not be announced accurately by assistive technology - meaning we're stuck. 

• I've tried downloading multiple types of Khmer fonts
• I've tried creating the document from scratch in Adobe rather than saving from Word 
• I've made sure that the downloaded fonts are saved in C:\Windows\Fonts
• I saw some potentially relevant advice to embed fonts and I followed the instructions here: https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/resources/embed-fonts-in-pdf.html but although the font is showing up in the main PDF editor, it doesn't show up in the menu for embedded fonts. Could this be the problem? (screenshots below)

Thank you for any advice you can provide, this has been a frustrating roadblock! 

Font is installed... 

...but doesn't show up on this embedding list

[Abambo]

The Khmer fonts are embedded in the document attached (Ctrl/CMD D ; Fonts)

It just looks like certain “modifiers” are not correctly shown. It's the first time I have seen Khmer text as this, so my observation may be utterly wrong.

[DTP2019]

Hello Hayley,

We are also encountering the same issue. Any chance you/your team found a way to fix the issue? Please let us know. We are also using MS Word and when we create a PDF using the Acrobat 'Create PDF' option, we see the same output as the screenshot you have provided. But, if we create a PDF using the 'Save As' option, the diamond question marks will disappear but some characters will show up as dotted circles instead, which means the characters are still corrupted.

Also, the fonts are already embedded in the PDF but the characters still show up as corrupted. If you cannot find the font you used from the list, you can add it manually, the same as in the screenshot below. Unfortunately, this still doesn't fix the issue.

Thank you very much and hoping to hear some answers/advice.

[An Pennino]

Hi!

Were you being able to fix the problem? I am working on a flyer InDesign Khmer document using Noto Sans Khmer font. Based on my poor understanding, the main problem must not be the fonts since the it looks perfect on the PDF page, but in the content tool, the text in the containers is showing up interspersed with diamond question mark characters: �. Therefore, it is an interface problem.

[SkellingtonWA]

I'm having the same problem, though my original document is in InDesign. Interestingly, the Khmer alt-text comes through just fine, with all characters & modifier characters intact. Following advice from this forum, I tried setting the "subset fonts when % of font used is less than X" to 1%, and rolling back to InD 18.5, but neither made a difference.

(Note, rolling back to 18.5 was helpful for a similar problem with Hindi, so it may work if you encounter this problem with languages that use devengari script).