Problem in displaying Japanese characters

[Guest]

Hi, I am having a problem on Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, as said on the title.

I made a document on Apache OpenOffice 4.1.5 which contains a few Japanese characters. When convert it into PDF and open the file the Japanese characters are shown as boxes or garbled characters.

I used a downloaded font called EB Garamond (downloaded form Google Fonts), but I don't think that is the problem because I tried to convert the document with the Japanese characters in a different font, like Times New Roman and Arial, with everything else in EB Garamond, but the problem is still there.

I also tried to play with the settings for the PDF conversion in OpenOffice (sorry for the Italian options in the screenshot), but nothing worked.

Does anyone know what the problem is?

I use macOS High Sierra (version 10.13.4) and Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (version 2018.011.20040).

[AnandSri]

Hello Rm,

We apologize for the inconvenience caused, as per the description above, Japanese Characters are not displaying correctly, Is that correct?

If the Japanese fonts are installed in the system, then please navigate toe Adobe Reader's preferences Acrobat Reader>Preferences>Page Display>under rendering select "use local fonts" and see if this brings any difference.

The correct place in your workflow to embed fonts is when you create the PDF file, not afterward in Acrobat. And Adobe Reader is a freeware software which cannot embed the fonts.

If the fonts in question i.e. Japanese are commercial fonts, you need to acquire valid licenses for same, whether or not the font vendor make such licenses and subsequent download available from the internet.

Note that this requires that (1) the missing fonts are actually installed on your system and (2) the fonts themselves do not prohibit embedding in a PDF file. Make sure that the fonts have the embedding rights.

Let us know how it goes and share your findings.

Regards,

Anand Sri.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Hi, thanks for your answer.

I figured out what the problem was. What I did was simply copying and pasting some Japanese characters from a website to my document on OpenOffice, where I could freely change their font to Times New Roman and Arial, but in reality the system's Times New Roman and Arial don't have Japanese characters, so that's why Acrobat could not recognise them after converting the odt file to a pdf. The problem was solved when I changed them to an actual Japanese font that I already had in my system (like Hiragino Mincho ProN): now Acrobat displays them correctly.

Thanks for the support.