Text exports as empty boxes

[HabitatTHK]

I have a PDF that is not secured.

The text is in Tahoma, which is installed and active on my computer.

The text edits easily on line at a time

However, if I selct all the text and copy it, when I paste it into anything, I get only a series of empty boxes. IF I do an export, I get empty boxes.

What gives?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Outside of the usual "Don't do major editing in Acrobat" warning, this is probably the issue:

The Tahoma text in your PDF has been saved with a different encoding (How old is the file?). This is usually because fonts are (usually) embedded as a subset, sometimes using a custom/different encoding quite different than the Tahoma you have on your system now. (If you look at the Document Properties > Fonts of your original PDF before you edited it, you will see the orginal encoding). When you make your edits in Acrobat, the Tahoma in your system is being used for the changes. Like nost Microsoft TrueType fonts, Tahoma has been greatly expanded from the version from years ago and are now encoded differently. (If you look at your Document Properties > Fonts AFTER your edits, you will see additional listings of Tahoma, with new encodinga)

The end result, is when you copy and paste, you can have text with different encodings in the same "clip"...the "old" encoding doesn't jive with the current encoding and hence garbled text.

Normally, you should be able to export the PDF as a Word file and that will try and sort out the encoding, so I'm curious what file format you exported to.

[HabitatTHK]

I tried Excel, Word, and plain text. All are the same boxes. sometimes empty boxes, sometimes boxes with a ? inside.

Is there a way to globally change the fonts used in the PDF?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

It could be your PDF is just plain old corrupted now.

Can you post a screen grab of your document Properties for Fonts?  before and after edits.

like so:

I know you said this was an unsecured file, but was it at some point? Some secure files will do a custom encoding which actually prevents copy and paste, and exporting.

One solution that has worked for some is to re-PDF the file by PRINTING it to a PDF Printer.

[HabitatTHK · Accepted solution]

I found a solution. From Acrobat Pro I printed it to a PDF file, making a new file. In the new PDF the font issues were resovled and I am now able to copy out the text.