Odd character fonts

[mattg74806564]

I have odd characters showing up one vendor invoice?  Thank You!

[Dov Isaacs]

We would need much more information that you are providing to even guess what is going on.

What are you viewing the PDF file in? Adobe Reader or Acrobat? A web browser (if so, which)? Something else?

Is this a file you created or one sent to you?

If you created the file, what was it created with (applications, tools, etc.)?

If  you could post the PDF file for us to download and examine, we might be able to give you more insight as to what is wrong.

          - Dov

[mattg74806564]

Hello Dov,

I'm using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

This is an invoice file sent to me and the odd character issue only happens with this one vendor?

I can post the PDF but I'm not seeing an attachment button?

Thank You! Matt

[Dov Isaacs]

Matt,

These forums do not provide for attachments. However, you can use Acrobat's Send-&-Track facility to send the file. Provide us the link on the forums and we'll grab the file.

Usually such gibberish problems are associated with oddball production of PDF files in which fonts are not embedded and encoding information is not properly put into the PDF file.

          - Dov

[mattg74806564]

Hello Dov, here is the link to my invoice file. Shared Files - Acrobat.com

Thank You for the help!

Matt

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

OK. Got it, thank you!

My observations:

(1)     Opening the PDF file with the latest updated version of Acrobat Pro DC on Windows 10, the areas of the document that show up in garbled characters on your system display perfectly fine on my system. I guess that's good and bad news. I can't replicate your display problem. Were you on MacOS or Windows?

(2)     Running Acrobat Pro DC's Preflight, no problems were found in terms of fonts other than that they are not embedded, a very poor practice given that …

(3)     Rather than using standard font names Arial and Arial-Bold, the creator of this PDF file used oddball names Arial+000040 and Arial,Bold+000041. These are not exact matches against any actual font name installed. What Acrobat did was replace Arial+000040 with an Adobe standard san serif face, Adobe Sans MM and Arial,Bold+000041 with Arial Bold (it apparently was able to guess this one). The PDF creator did not use accepted, standard practices for denoting the names of fonts, especially since these fonts were not embedded in the PDF file.

(4)     Looking at the Document Properties, this PDF file was apparently made by taking a PCL print stream from the billing application and creating PDF using a product called PCL2PDF which apparently produces somewhat problematic PDF based on what you received. Assuming that the billing software had no means of producing PDF itself, it would have been better to produce non-wonky PDF by producing PostScript and converting that to PDF via Acrobat Distiller (we also have server versions of such software) or printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance under Windows). Based on the title of the document shown below, I suspect that the invoice was produced either under MacOS or Linux.

(5)     I did try to coerce Acrobat's Preflight to somehow “fix” the document's font issues by embedding fonts, but alas, it was also befuddled by the font names referenced in the PDF file, but not exactly matching anything on my system.

Sorry I can't be of any better assistance to you on this. You might want to let the company sending this invoice to you that they are producing very problematic PDF files.

          - Dov

[Bernd Alheit]

Did you install the updates?