Gibberish when inserting text with the text tool

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JThorpe
Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Mar 26, 2019 9:15 pm

Gibberish when inserting text with the text tool

Post by JThorpe »

Hi there. We’ve been using PitStop at my company for 10+ years, and have hit a problem we’ve never encountered before.

We receive PDFs from academic authors and use PitStop to edit and standardize them before publication. Some PDFs (all created with OSX Mojave, though not all Mojave-created PDFs exhibit this behavior) are displaying gibberish when we try to insert text using the PitStop text tool. (E.g., we try to type a capital letter H in a title and it appears as an f or a !) If we try to add text with Acrobat’s native tool, it shows up correctly, but as soon as we convert it to the embedded font it becomes gibberish.

This behaves like a font misencoding issue (what’s encoded as f is displaying as H), but the PDF is searchable and copy-and-pasteable. Usually we would fix this by exporting the PDF to PostScript and recreating it; if we do that, it looks fine but is no longer searchable. (Searchability is necessary for our publications.)

As I said, this is a new problem for us, and it’s happening on 1/8 of the PDFs we received, from different authors in different countries. It’s not something PitStop is doing wrong, but it is PitStop that allowed us to see the problem. Has anyone else encountered it in Mojave-created PDFs? Any suggestions toward a fix, other than asking the authors to resubmit PDFs made in a different way? Could this be some new under-the-hood encryption?

Thanks!
abailescollins
Advanced member
Posts: 458
Joined: Wed Apr 22, 2015 4:28 pm

Re: Gibberish when inserting text with the text tool

Post by abailescollins »

Can you contact Enfocus support please. Support@enfocus.com
They'll probably need to involve develoment to answer this one.
Head of Product Management @ Ultimate
abc@imposition.com
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