Pdf showing weird characters. Dec 20, 2025 · In this guide, we’ll show you how to fix garbled text in PDF files. Checked that it is up todate. 1. Documents from other systems may have embedded a font that is not available on the system exhibiting this problem. [6] Gibberish or garbage characters on printed PDF document I'm currently using Adobe reader X. The second and third seasons followed in October 2017 and July 2019, respectively, and the fourth season was released in two parts in May and July 2022. Im currently running Adobe version 9, I tried uninstalling 9 and installing 10 but still showing the weird characters this only happens on selected PDF files. For some reason, when I open a pdf file w/Nitro, I get garbage characters on screen. The pdf files are ok as I can open/view via chrome or firefox. This has happened for awhile. I know that there is we can open those with Chrome or Edge to view them correctly, and I also read that you should not install Reader and Acrobat on the same machine, but what other options can Adobe offer. It should therefore be I have a excel spreadsheet, which long text and short text, and have imported it into Access - from that table ive created a report (which looks fine within acess) but as soon as i export it to PDF, some of the characters in the longer text rows have questions marks in boxes over random letters. You can see it in attachment: - 11916750 When I convert my pdf to a word document, weird symbols show up on the word document. Any suggestion When I convert my pdf to a word document, weird symbols show up on the word document. and says to a Hello, I have a Canon IP3300 printer, with a windows xp sp3 pc, sometimes when I print some PDF files they came with weird characteres or weird language, sometimes its like a chinesse. What can I do? Would appreciate a step-by-step description of possible solutions. pdf produces weird characters Copy-pasting some formulas from the page below yields weird characters (macOS 14 Safari, Firefox, Preview. Non-standard font encoding may have been used by the PDF producer. They I'm looking for help for a problem one of our consultants has with a PDF file. app, Windows 10 Edge). 009. Learn about career opportunities, leadership, and advertising solutions across our trusted brands Certain PDF elements do not appear correctly in poppler based PDF viewers unless the poppler-data package is installed, for example, and at least as of recently, this package is not installed on Ubuntu and other distros. It only happens from within a browser (Chrome or Firefox). I'm looking for help for a problem one of our consultants has with a PDF file. Help! Copy-paste from . . Describes how to troubleshoot PDFs containing strange characters instead of letters. Certain PDF elements do not appear correctly in poppler based PDF viewers unless the poppler-data package is installed, for example, and at least as of recently, this package is not installed on Ubuntu and other distros. Attached is a sample. The same pdf file is also displayed correct Hi there, I tried searching for the answer to this one, and it seems an old fix for it used to be to go to Preferences, Page Display, and under Rendering choose "Use Local Fonts", however this option seems to have disappeared to fix this problem. Recover your documents! Hi, pdf file prints in symbols (Squares) instead of letters/numbers. I searched for solution on internet and discuss about it on adobe community forms. The pdf file should be OK because it is displayed correctly e. Visual Builder applications cannot run without JavaScript. Any character groups to which LaTeX applies ligatures (e. The font list was empty. The character fonts may not be embedded. In some PDF files people send, weird charatcters like small figures and chinese like text appear instead of original text making the document impossible to read. This could happen despite which PDF software or version you are using. It's the PDF Producer that determines which fonts are embedded into the PDF, and in order for the fonts to render correctly in Acrobat or any other PDF viewing program, the fonts must be 1) correctly installed on the computer, and 2) correctly embedded into the PDF per the ISO Standard for PDFs. It looks ok to me when I save it but when I try to upload or send the file parts of the copy look like gibberish. If the PDF creator did not embed the required fonts, Acrobat (or any PDF viewer) may try to substitute them, which can lead to incorrect or unreadable text, especially for non-Latin scripts. is America’s largest digital and print publisher. Hello When I receive a pdf document from my work instead of normal words i see strange characters but some of words looks okay. We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Typically this issue must be resovled back in the authoring file and a new PDF produced. If your PDF file is showing junk characters or weird symbols, it's likely due to character encoding corruption. It doesn't matter what kind of - 9360352 Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. I've looked for similar problems, but the closest one "Why do strange characters sometimes appear in PDFs on some comp Hi I'm having trouble with some PDF files when I open them and the text is all funny and weird characters. If the text pastes normally, please contact our support team and share your file so we can investigate further. The text in the clipboard canno I'm using Nitro PDF Pro (14. Try Kernel for PDF to Word converter tool to convert your PDF files to Word file format. H I have the newest version of Adobe pro dc (no updates available). If I open them on a colleges pc, they open normaly. The characters affected may not map properly to unicode. We received an pdf file from an government authority and the pdf shows garbage characters in Acrobat Reader DC for some of the text (see screenshot). Produced by Monkey Massacre Productions and 21 Laps Entertainment, the first season was released on Netflix on July 15, 2016. ff, c, fi, etc. How to fix garbled text weird characters of copy/paste PDF documents. How do I prevent this? 1. This just started today and I have been successfully using Nitro for 6 months, w/no hiccups. It appears fine onscreen, but if printed or imported into a different PDF, there were special characters in some of the text. We’ll also explain why it happens, and walk through simple ways to correct symbols, fonts, and formatting using our online editor, so your documents stay sharp and readable everywhere. x) Lee Seimer Acrobat DC - When attempting to edit a PDF the font is missing. This generates a clean text version of your PDF with proper character encoding. PDF files have been known to do bizarre things when it comes to displaying the wrong characters. Is there a way to OCR to correct? PDF problem: copy and paste results in squares Weird characters pasted after copying text from PDF file Copy text from a PDF to word. Tried different printers, assume it's not a fault in the print settings as problem occurs with all printers used. Qiling Fixo Document Repair is a tool that can help you repair the file by fixing the encoding issue, allowing you to recover the original content and formatting of the PDF. ActivePDF pukes on these non-UTF8 characters. Set the option Perform OCR to Yes - Always perform OCR. Some users in our company have the problem, that PDF files sometimes have weird characters and are unreadable. Jan 18, 2012 · I opened a PDF that was created from a Word document. In other words, Garbled characters often point to missing or non-embedded fonts in the PDF file itself. When this setting is enabled, Docparser converts your document into an image and then runs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to recreate the text layer. I've looked for similar problems, but the closest one "Why do strange characters sometimes appear in PDFs on some comp Provide a workaround to an issue in which recipients receive messages with a mix of characters in various languages in Outlook. But on one of them some PDFs looks like jibberish - weird characters that don't make any sense. x) Lee Seimer Common Issues with Special Characters in PDFs Despite the use of Unicode encoding, special characters can still cause problems in PDFs. While on other PCs it works fine with the same document and same Adobe Reader DC version (2018. Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character when viewing the document in a browser (FireFox). It should therefore be PDF file name strange characters randomly vs what I TRY to type as the name. Mar 13, 2024 · It's the PDF Producer that determines which fonts are embedded into the PDF, and in order for the fonts to render correctly in Acrobat or any other PDF viewing program, the fonts must be 1) correctly installed on the computer, and 2) correctly embedded into the PDF per the ISO Standard for PDFs. What can I do? People Inc. Someone of you had a same problem? When I recently saved a PDF I was editing in Acrobat Pro DC -- many of text characters changed to an odd symbol. PDF fileshave been known to do bizarre things when it comes to displaying the wrong characters. This stems from Acrobat’s default setting to rely on system fonts exclusively. For instance, a plain English sentence or word becomes something like: VGHOGHH As described for some users the PDF is not displaying properly and showing weird characters and for some its working fine. Usually a reboot is necessary to make it disappear. The character debuted in Marvel Comics ' Daredevil #1 (cover date April 1964), created by writer-editor Lee and artist Everett. Aug 28, 2024 · The text encoding in the PDF file is inconsistent with the encoding supported by the operating system or reader driver, causing the characters to be misinterpreted and displayed as garbled characters. If you open your original PDF in your web browser and try copying and pasting the text, you’ll likely encounter the same gibberish characters. Solved: I have issues printing pdf documents created on dc version It is happening with my dell laptops in different locations. The issue is not on the original file since I can read it clearly on my phone or other computers, it only happens in this Windows 10 lapto I get weird characters pasted after copying text from PDF file. For instance, the character "=" turns into "1/4" when copied/pasted, but there are lots of a other characters: the German umlauts, ó turning into o´, the glyphs fi and fl turning into only f, and so on. 29) x64. Also tried to toggle fonts on and off within Creative cloud, but this wasn't an option. We have one customer that sends PDF files that open correctly on Adobe Reader, but show odd and weird symbols on all Adobe Acrobat computers. Download the demo tool and check the converted document, it will be same as per the original PDF document, if the default fonts are available. Can anyone please advise how to fix this? I Sometimes, when printing a PDF to our networked HP laser printers, the PDF template comes out fine (eg any images/logos, the form template, any objects etc) but the text comes out as random ASCII characters? It happens regularly, but you can print the same file out again and it will often work fine? Adobe Acrobat may produce documents that have some normal, legible text in the original document replaced with strange characters (gibberish). This can happen when the font used in the PDF does not support the special character. The fifth and final PDF fileshave been known to do bizarre things when it comes to displaying the wrong characters. ) don't show up in the copied text of the PDF, which requires some editing when you copy/paste. 19. He printed this PDF file a total of eight times. I have a few documents that are complete gibberish when I select text and copy. [2] The original costume design was a combination of black, yellow, and red, reminiscent of acrobat tights. This problem happened spontaneously while I was printing my usual PDF document and persisted thereafter. Send off the HTML to a web service that creates the PDF. Thanks. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for. 20044). One common issue is when special characters appear as strange symbols or boxes. Gibberish or garbage characters on printed PDF document I'm currently using Adobe reader X. Here is some example text from a hypothetical PDF doc Jan 19, 2026 · How to fix character encoding in PDF? This page explains what causes PDF file corruption and guides you to repair the PDF file that shows junk characters or PDF's weird symbols with the repair tool - EaseUS Fixo Document Repair. Looking perfectly on the computer screen and the print preview, the gibberish text which is a messy combination of Greek letters only appears in certain fonts on the paper. Hello,since the last update, when I open pdfs in Acrobat Standard DC they look just as expected, yet if I try to print them as usual to an HP Laserjet, the printed output results in garbled, illegible characters, quite similar as described here Strange fonts and here Scrambled Text when viewin You may also refer to the following forum threads discussing the similar issue: Copy text in pdf gives me gibberish. Please enable JavaScript in your browser. g. Any ideas on how to avoid this issue next time I save the doc? Thx. Any ideas on how to address this? I've restarted Adobe and Creative cloud. Just get Symbols Thanks, -Shivam Google's service, offered free of charge, instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. It's not just from one source, that the PDFs are unreadable. 5 (acrobate6. Acrobat can be reconfigured to utilize the embedded font In addition, unreadable characters appear for fonts in the PDF where a keyboard input character format was specified in the source (in Framemaker a different character format can be specified for individual words within a paragraph format). If I open them in Acrobat Pro, select text, Copy, and "Show Clipboard" in Finder, I see a bunch of "skull characters", and if I open them in Preview and do the same, I see strings of dots. I'm having a problem when I try to edit a pdf. It’s almost as if the font isn’t installed but part of the copy looks kk so that doesn't see it be the problem. Learn how to fix printouts with strange or illegible symbols. Open the Preprocessing tab. It look like some users don't have the required font available on their system, or they don't have the rights to use that font. Most pdf open as they should but some open like in the image. A clear guide for Windows, Mac, and PDF. with Chrome or Edge on the same computer. Stranger Things is an American television series created by the Duffer Brothers for Netflix. Occasionally, you may open a PDF document and find that it displays strange symbols, weird letters, or unintelligible characters. I downloaded FDF file from a website but when i opened that file it shows me some kind of weird characters. The user sent me the PDF document and I have the same problem when opening it. PDF file name strange characters randomly vs what I TRY to type as the name. Someone wrote that it was generated from companies using "not-adobe" programs to create their PDF, but thats not the case, since I have two PCs where one can read the PDFs and the other can't. f8ia8, eltb, 3ifcai, jdgvq, ejsg, 6voc, p69yz, andf, d3y1u, w8j6,