Black boxes over text

[evand85701]

I have Adobe Acrobat X Pro running on Windows 10. Some of the pdfs I open have black rectangular boxes over some text. When my co-worker opens the same doc on her computer, the boxes are not there. These are not redaction boxes- I can highlight the text, copy it and paste into word. Any ideas??

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[Adorobat]

Hi evand85701,

Could you please try following steps and see if that  resolve the issue:

1- Check for updates, launch Acrobat>navigate to help menu>select Check for Updates. If there is an update available, download and install it and then relaunch Acrobat.

2- If that doesn't work, select Edit menu>Preferences>Page Display>Rendering>Smooth Text>select None from the drop down options>OK

3- Relaunch Acrobat.

Let me know the version of Acrobat X installed on the computer?

[evand85701]

Thank you for your response

1- No updates available

2- Didn't work

I am running Acrobat X Pro version 10.1.16.

I am enclosing a sample of what i see, with text highlighted, It should be

noted that when I print out this page, it comes out normal.

Also when I open the same document with Adobe Reader, the problem does not

occur.

Thanks for your help- I am pretty dumbfounded by this.

Evan

[kstrode]

I'm having the same issue with certain documents sent from a particular vendor.  I tried the steps given above with no success.  I'm using Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.

[Amal.]

Hi Kstrode

We are sorry to hear that. As described yu are using Acrobat 9 Pro and experiencing some issues.

Adobe Acrobat 9 pro is an old and Eol application and problems are expected to appear with such an old version of the application. Please upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. By upgrading installations to the latest versions, customers benefit from the latest functional enhancements and improved security measures.

For more information please take a look at the help page https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/end-support-acrobat-8-reader.html

Regards

Amal

[default6c478g19n7t7]

I use Adobe Acrobat DC and when I redact and apply redactions, I get black boxes at the bottom of the page where I have not redacted.  This redacts mostly white space, but there is a last line with identifying information at the bottom of the page that is also redacted.  When I remove the black box, which is a pain because on a large document it takes a long time to complete this task) it also removes this one line of text.

[gkaiseril]

Is your coworker using Acrobat X?

Have you checked

Adobe products and Enterprise Technical Support
periods covered under the new Lifecycle Policy

For the expiration of support for Acrobat/Reader X?

It look like support for Acrobat/Reader X ended November 15, 2015. It might be time to consider updating.

It might be some preference setting. Are the PDFs you looking at forms?

If so check the field highlighting.

[robertwinters · Accepted solution]

I recently encountered this same problem, i.e. black boxes covering various portions of my PDF documents when I viewed them within Acrobat X Pro (with Windows 7). They were fine when viewed in the Chrome browser.

After searching for an answer, I finally just tried making random changes under "Edit Preferences" and discovered the culprit. Under "Accessibility" the box for "Replace Document Colors" was checked (I don't know why, but maybe I'm at fault), and when I unchecked the box the problem was solved.

It appears that the boxes were generally in places where there was some kind of colored shading, and apparently the colors were being replaced by pure black which rendered the text in those areas entirely obscured.

What a relief!

Robert Winters
Cambridge, MA

[Chris OU Sooner]

I was having the same issue on fillable forms and updated my version of DC to 2022.001.20085 on Windows 10, and the issue is now fixed. I had to go into task manager & kill all open/ruuning Adobe programs even after I closed them because it would not finish the install without it.