Problem with font display in Reader

[Oskar23992016r3zy]

We’re having a weird problem with opening documents using Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.

When we open the document some of it’s text is displayed incorrectly – instead of being where it should be, it is scattered in a weird way (black boxes are there to hide clients information 🙂 ) : 

It only occurs on one computer when opening documents from one specific provider and only in Reader – in web browsers or foxit reader it works fine.

We tried reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, changing it’s settings, installing fonts, different versions of Reader and even performing a clean reinstall of Windows 10 Pro.

We were able to fix this issue, but only for a moment, most of the time it breaks when the user tries to print the document, sometimes simply when it is opened.

What we did was copying contents of AppData (Local/LocalLow/Roaming) adobe folders from another user on this PC (it is in a domain) into AppData of the target user.

I’d be grateful for any help on this topic 😊

[Amal.]

Hi there

Hope you are doing well and sorry for the trouble.

It looks like the required font is not properly embedded into the PDF file, it is not present on the system or you may not have the required permission to use the font. For more info about font embedding please check the help page https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/pdf-fonts.html

Please goto Edit (Win), Adobe Acrobat (Mac) > Preferences > Page Display, Under rendering, select 'Use Local Font' > Click OK and reboot the computer once and check.

Regards

Amal

[Oskar23992016r3zy]

Hello,

Unfortunately I've already tried changing this setting and it didn't help 😞 

As I said I tried playing with settings before and was't able to get any results.

Regards,

Oskar 

[Amal.]

Hi there

We are sorry to hear that.

Is this an issue with a particular PDF file or with all the PDFs? Please try with a different PDF file and check.

Also, please share the PDF file in question so that we can check it at our end.

Regards

Amal

[Oskar23992016r3zy]

Hi,

As i said, the problem occurs only when opening PDF documents from one specific provider. 

Other PDF's are working fine. The problem is that it also works fine on other computers, only on this one there is a problem. 

About providing the file: I can't share it just like that because it contains protected data of our client.

Best regards,

Oskar 

[Amal.]

Hi Oskar,

Hope you are doing well and sorry to hear that.

There is nothing much that we can do without actually looking at the file.

Please ask the creator of the PDF file to create it using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC application and see if that helps.

Regards

Amal

[Oskar23992016r3zy]

Hi!

Creating pdf file with pro is propably not an option - from what i know the document provider is generating those documents from theirs internal software.

Maybe I could send the pdf to you in private message?

Regards,

Oskar

[Amal.]

Hi Oskar

Hope you are doing well and sorry for the trouble.

Please share the PDF file in question in a private message so that we can check it at our end.

Regards

Amal

[Oskar23992016r3zy]

Hello,

You should have it in your PM.

Regards

Oskar

[Amal.]

Hi Oscar

I have tried to open the PDF file that you have shared at my end, and it's displaying well without any wired characters. 

It looks like the required fonts are not available on your computer system, there isn't much that we can do from our end. Please check for any missing/pending updates for your computer OS and try updating it and see if that works.

Regards

Amal

[Oskar23992016r3zy]

Hi,

The computer has all possible updates installed, there was even a clean reinstall of operating system during the case. I've already spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. Even moving fonts form other computer is not working. 

I have again tried using local fonts and this time got something like this:

The only way i can make those fonts look normal is by copyig files directly from another user appdata. But it works only for a short moment as I already said.

Any idea what i could check or try? 

Regards, 

Oskar 

[Amal.]

Hi there,

There isn't much that we can do. Please try to get in touch with the creator of the PDF file and check.

Regards

Amal

[Bagrista]

Hi Amal,

are you paid to copy/paste "answers" like this? I'm pretty sure this helps no one. We need real TECH support.

Thanks in advance.

Jiří

[Pivan78]

Hello.
I actually had the same problem on two computers at the company where I work.
All Adobe Acrobat DC version 2022.003.20310 64bit documents are displaying correctly, only from these two computers the fonts are displaying incorrectly. If I open the same document on my computer, everything is correct... If I open the document on the problem computers in EDGE, everything is correct... If I open the document in Adobe Acrobat, it displays the wrong font... If I print the document in EDGE using Microsoft PDF printer and open it in Adobe Acrobat, the document looks fine. If I compare the two files, the second one is 261 kb and the original one is 48 kb.  The original document shows PDF Producer: eDocEngine VCL 5.0.0.548 and PDF Version > 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x). Printed document show PDF Producer: Microsoft: (Acrobat 8.x): Print To PDF and PDF Version: 1.7 (Acrobat 8.x).
It looks like Jiri is from Czech Republic and I am from Slovakia, then maybe there is a localization problem??
In my case I tried switching Adobe Reader to English language, then back to Slovak language and the document displayed correctly..
A strange thing happened to me, when I went to repeat this procedure on the second affected computer, I did nothing at all and the same document was already displayed correctly without my intervention. Therefore, I cannot consider this as a solution..

[Ida32899489mylm]

I have the same issue.

Some documents from two certain providers (our mother company's document system or our business system, nothing I can control or change) will not open correctly when saved/downloaded or "printed" using Microsoft print to pdf. They get displayed exactly as the images above. But only some days, and only some documents. 
If I attached a corrupted document to an email and send it to a colleague it opens as it should on any other computer. I am the only user at my company with this problem. I have uninstalled/reinstalled Adobe Reader (free version) several times, rebooted the computer, changed the settings as suggested etc but it doesn't help. Opening the file in a different reader (chrome/edge) solves the issue, but that is a workaround I should not need to use and it limits my possibilities to work with the document.

However, today when this happened I left the document open for our IT department to see when they come by this afternoon. After about 1h the fonts are suddenly displayed correctly. This makes absolutely no sense.

I cannot recreate the issue as I have no idea what triggers it in the first place, it seems completely random. Sometimes it opens showing the text in Wingdings and in front of my eyes changes back to "normal" within a few seconds. But most common is the view shown in the example above and no changes.

This issue has been occuring from time to time for the last perhaps 6 months and it is very annoying. It has also happened when other users has downloaded the same main document from the document system, attached it and emailed it to me. To them it looks good, whereas I get hieroglyphs. Our IT department is at wits' end and tries the same remedies every time to no avail.
I am working on a Dell computer running Windows 10 with all the latest updates and I completely reinstalled Adobe Reader (free version) this morning, with a fresh download from your website.

[Amal.]

Hi there

We're here to assist you with your Adobe Acrobat issue. We're sorry to hear that you're experiencing problems with it.

To address the issue, please follow these steps:

1. First, ensure that you have the most recent version, which is 23.06.20320, installed. You can check for updates by going to Help > Check for updates. After updating, reboot your computer.

2. If the problem persists, try repairing the installation (this option is available for Windows only). You can do this from the help menu.

3. Turn off the protected mode for troubleshooting purposes. To do this, follow these steps:

   • Go to Edit > Preferences.
   • Navigate to Enhanced Security and uncheck 'Enable Protected mode at startup.'
   • Click OK and then reboot the application to see if the issue is resolved.

4. If the problem persists, you can try resetting Acrobat preferences to their default settings. This can be done by following the instructions provided here: Adobe Community - How to Reset Acrobat Preference Settings to Default

5. Another troubleshooting step is to create a new test user profile with full admin rights on Windows and try using the application from there. This can help determine if the issue is related to user-specific settings.

Let us know how it goes.

~Amal

[Dre-T1102]

Had a user with this error and noticed these are character map fonts, these kind of fonts are local to the computer and can sometimes be displayed like this in web pages for organizational use, I hadn't noticed they could be on Adobe until today. I went into Preferences --> Page Display (Right column) --> Under rendering, turn "Use Local Fonts" off. 

This turning this setting off seemed to have fixed the page instantly for this user, they only had this issue from a specific sender, not all their documents were like this. I told them they may need to re-enable the setting if they ever encounter font issues with other documents from other providers that they receive documents from.