Text garbled in Combined PDF

Report · Nov 05, 2019

Having a problem when merging .PDF files together. The text in the resultant file become garbled where it looks like some letters become invisible. The originals do not seem to have any problems on their own. Files are attached. Any suggestions?

The merged file is rather large, but well within the limits of what Acrobat can handle. These are architecture / engineering drawings, sheet size 30"x42". The resultant PDF after merging is about 630 MB.

Report · Nov 05, 2019

How does you create the PDF files?

Report · Nov 05, 2019

The files were creted by our consultant, so I do not have any specifics about driver version or anything like that. I am not the one that made the original documents. The software program we use to create our drawings is Autodesk Revit, running on Windows.

After this morning I did some further investigation in the Document Properties > Fonts palette. The fonts listed look to me like replacements, as shown in the image below. I'm guessing that the font is not embedded in the PDF file which is why is why letters appear to drop out when we merge the consultants sheets with sheets created by my company. Most of the text on the pages use Arial Narrow.

Report · Feb 19, 2020

Has this ever been sorted out? I have the same problem. We are a consulting firm who receives PDF's from external third party consultants. The PDF's we receive have been exported / PDF'd from "Bluebeam", REVIT, AutoCAD etc etc. and also reports from Microsoft Word.. other programs etc . We end up having the same problem with the fonts being garbled.

Report · Feb 19, 2020

For starters, check to see if all of the fonts are being embedded into the PDFs when they are originally created (before they're combined).

See these posts for guidance on how to set the PDF conversion settings in different applications.

Embed fonts into PDF with Acrobat

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/scrambled-text-when-viewing-pdf-documents-in-acrobat-standard...

Embed fonts into PDF as it's exported from Word

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/exporting-from-word-to-adobe-pro-dc/m-p/10659176#M221357

Report · Feb 20, 2020

Hi Bruce. In our case we were able to work it out. The original author had to reprint the drawings and make sure the fonts were being embedded by adjusting the settings in the PDF driver. Our consultants were using a mixture of AutoCAD and Revit to print from and they were using a different PDF driver from each software. We couldn't fix it on our end. If you don't have contact with the document author I don't know how else to fix it. I looked for solutions on how to replace the fonts with ones on our own system, but I was not successful.

Andy