Losing Foreign Characters

[fabiana.f]

I have to create a PDF document for our German customers and when I download it from our website it displays it on the browser. However, some of the special characters in the document are not spaced correctly, so I was trying to move them using Adobe Pro. When I open the document in Adobe Pro these characters are missing and just have a square box where the characters once were. How do I prevent this from happening or will I have to go through the whole document adding the missing characters manually?

 From the above example, taken from the PDF opened in the browser, you can see the special characters are not spaced correctly.

 From the above example, taken from Adobe Pro, you can see the special characters are missing.

[JR Boulay]

Which software are you using for creating this PDF form?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Several things can be at play here. I suspect that whatever program created the PDF was not configured to properly embed the fonts, so when you open it elsewhere it's relying on availble system fonts.

Even if there was a proper emded, often, language glyphs are embedded separately.

What does it show in the Document Properties > Fonts?

How was the file created?

Can you upload it here?

[fabiana.f]

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I cannot upload the file because it contains sensetive information. However, I have managed to veiw the Fonts see attached:

[fabiana.f]

The document is stored as a webpage on our webportal for our customers. It is created when export to PDF is selected.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

That's your issue. The fonts have not been embedded in the PDF, so they are being subsituted by an alternative. This could change depending on where you are viewing this PDF (i.e. a browser, Acrobat or other PDF reader), and even on which computer. In your case, a pretty typical substution for Helvetica is Arial, and your Times-Roman (which is NOT Times New Roman) is being substituted with Times New Roman.

Trying to edit these will be problematic as they were cretaed with old Type 1 fonts, but you are trying to edit with the Arial on your system. Unfortunately, font encodings are different so the special characters in the Heveltica no longer matchup with the Unicode encoding of current Arial, hence the "boxes".

Your only true solution is to re-export the PDF and change your Export settings to embed all fonts.

What you haven't mentioned is what kind of document it is you've exported? You should change that document to replace the old Type 1 Helvetica and Times; you will only have worse issues going forward.

[MikelKlink]

It looks like there are more problems in your document than merely incorrectly spaced characters. Can you share one such document for analysis?